Gov. Kathy Hochul told the media that New York has a budget deal on Thursday at the state Capitol. Lawmakers disagree.
Timothy Fanning / Times Union
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters Thursday that: “There’s no deal. I just think it was very premature for the governor to make this announcement.” (Timothy Fanning/Times Union).
Timothy Fanning / Times Union
ALBANY — Count me among the many New Yorkers who struggle to get interested in the budget drama that consumes portions of this town every spring. Late, on time, whatever. Just let me know when it’s done and if my taxes are going up.
But the weird awkwardness on display Thursday was compelling, and not just because it illustrated, once again, that New York state government still doesn’t work — and that Gov. Kathy Hochul is still struggling with this governance thing, nearly five years into the job.
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If you missed the goofiness, well, it started with Hochul announcing, triumphantly, that a budget deal had been reached. Hooray! Who’s in charge of the bunting? I’ll bring the noisemakers!
Alas, the budget missed its due date by five weeks, so the bravado should have been muted. But that wasn’t stopping our governor.
“I’m demonstrating the hard leadership this moment requires,” Hochul declared at a news conference, soon after telling us that she takes on “the hard fights, the ones that people know should have been taken on but no one did it — and I did it.”
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Oh sure, politicians are going to brag a bit. It comes with the job. What else would we expect?
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And since the budget may stave off economic disaster by making controversial changes to the 2019 Climate Act, maybe the governor deserves a few horn toots.
“We got it done,” Hochul said, four times.
The problem came when reporters spoke to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.
“There’s no deal,” the Bronx Democrat said. “I just think it was very premature for the governor to make this announcement.”
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In videos of the moment, Heastie looks grumpy. Well, yes, he often looks that way. But this time, more than usual. He might have even been angry.
If so, you can understand why. If you’re negotiating to sell your house, you don’t want to find the buyers sitting in the living room before the deal has closed. Pretending to have an agreement when you don’t is an act of bad faith, and in this case, the governor seemed to be twisting the Legislature’s proverbial arm into a deal lawmakers weren’t ready to make.
At least I think that was the strategy. Quite a few observers were genuinely befuddled by the governor’s move when many not-so-minor details hadn’t been hammered out.
“We signed off on nothing major,” said grumpy Heastie, who added that the process is broken because governors insist on stuffing so much nonfiscal policy into the budget.
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“I’m saying this to you all very clearly: I am never doing this again,” Heastie said. “Budgets are supposed to be about money, not policy.”
It wasn’t precisely clear to me what Heastie won’t do again. But if lawmakers reject the policies jammed into the next budget by Gov. Bruce Blakeman — just kidding! — New York will be better off. It’s a bad and fundamentally undemocratic way to govern, as everyone knows. It stymies debate about laws that deserve to be debated.
In any event, Hochul’s deal-that-wasn’t-a-deal includes $268 billion in spending. If that seems like a lot, well, it is.
Consider that the sum is 26% higher than the $212 billion budget approved by lawmakers five years ago. The budget, at least as Hochul described it, also includes $14 billion more in spending than what was approved last year.
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And here’s betting that the top line will have climbed higher once the T’s are crossed on a finalized budget. The answer to every problem is more spending, after all, and heading in the other direction isn’t even a consideration.
Here’s where I could point out that New York’s state government spends more than twice as much as Florida, despite having a smaller population. But that would lead to a chorus of emails telling me how cheap, awful and ineffective Florida’s government is, along with some diatribes about the terribleness of Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor.
So I will instead note that Hochul’s deal-that-wasn’t-a-deal would spend just $81 billion less than the $349 billion budget proposed in California, even though that state has double the population. I may also get a few diatribes about the awfulness of Gavin Newsom, but the point is that New York lawmakers continue to spend like sailors on shore leave, six beers in.
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Hochul didn’t mention that in her congratulatory press conference. Nor will most lawmakers, when and if a budget deal is truly done.