The Capitol is reflected in a window at Albany City Hall on June 1, 2026.
Will Waldron/Times Union
“I’m never doing this again. Budgets are supposed to be about money, not policy.”
That’s what Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie told reporters in May as state budget negotiations between the Legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul dragged on.
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We share his frustration: New York’s budget process gives governors the power to pack the spending plan with nonbudgetary policy bills — a system that this editorial board has long argued quashes debate, sidesteps accountability and stifles democratic participation in lawmaking. And the annual tug-of-war over policy legislation is a big reason state budgets come in late – as happened again this year.
But Mr. Heastie is wrong. He might say he’s “never doing this again,” but he will.
Why? Because lawmakers didn’t use any of their few remaining session days to do anything to change the budget process. Yes, most meaningful changes would take an amendment to the state constitution, but they could have at least started that ball rolling. They didn’t. So next year, Mr. Heastie will find himself back in the same situation, with the same complaints.
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Improving the budget process is just one of the issues that saw no action in the end-of-session frenzy. With the overstuffed budget dragging on almost two months past deadline, lawmakers worked frantically in their remaining handful of session days to consider all the other legislation for the year.
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And that’s another casualty of the drawn-out budget process: Everything else ends up rushed and opaque. At issue is not how many bills got passed before session ended. It’s whether the process is as fair, accessible and thoughtful as it could be.
Here’s a look at some other bills the state Legislature didn’t take up this year but should have — plus one we’re glad they didn’t.
The Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, which saw heavy industry lobbying again this year, never came up for a vote. “There’s not enough votes to pass the bill,” Mr. Heastie said in early June. That’s odd, considering the bill has 77 Assembly co-sponsors in a chamber of 150 seats.
The measure would lay the groundwork for a 30% reduction in total packaging waste over 12 years. It would also ban a host of toxic chemicals in packaging and compel manufacturers to help cover the expense of dealing with the packaging they create. As landfills reach capacity, the planet chokes on waste and scientists learn more about plastic’s risks to public health, this bill was a chance to stem the tide and cut waste costs for municipalities.
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An expanded bottle bill would have helped, too. We guzzle a lot more beverage types than we did in 1982, when the original bottle redemption bill was enacted. Legislation would have covered more beverage types and increased the 5-cent bottle deposit to 10 cents (which wouldn’t even cover the cost of inflation — a nickel in 1982, when the original bottle bill was enacted — is worth 17 cents today). Bottle redemption centers — necessary for the return system to work — aren’t making enough to stay open. Without more investment, one of New York’s top recycling success stories is headed toward failure.
Speaking of outdated numbers: The current minimum SNAP allowance is $24 a month for a one- or two-person household. That $6 a week could maybe cover breakfast, if all you want is a box of cereal and a bunch of bananas. Oh, you wanted milk with that cereal? Coffee? Not likely.
The minimum allowance was never supposed to cover everything, of course, but these days it doesn’t cover much of anything at all. A bill before the Legislature would have raised the minimum SNAP benefit to $100 per month, an amount that has a chance to make a difference for New York families teetering on the edge of food insecurity — and it would have been all the more valuable in the face of federal benefit cuts.
Purchasing an “event contract” on a prediction market isn’t at all the same as placing a wager in a New York casino. Heavens, no. After all, casinos are strictly regulated.
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Prediction markets claim that placing bets on questions like “Who’ll win the World Cup?” or “Who’ll be eliminated next on ‘Love Island USA’?” is akin to commodities trading. Give us a break. It’s just, as state Attorney General Letitia James has put it, “illegal gambling by another name.” Her office is pushing back in the courts — but lawmakers missed the chance to lay down some regulations on the markets, which are only going to grow.
Several worthy transparency initiatives fell by the wayside this session. Among them: a requirement that companies that get state or local subsidies report on how many jobs they actually create, and a measure to improve Freedom of Information Law compliance by requiring state agencies to report their FOIL data annually to the state Committee on Open Government — how many requests received and how they were resolved — so the public can see how well they comply with open records laws.
And while the list of bills we were happy to see die in committee is a long one, we will draw your attention to one in particular: a proposed measure that “provides for the sealing of unfounded, exonerated, and pending claims made against law enforcement officers” that would have allowed for these claims to be redacted from disciplinary records.
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Six years ago, the Legislature made an enormous improvement in transparency by erasing 50-a, the law that allowed virtually all police disciplinary records to remain secret. This new measure, if it’s ever passed, would greatly undo that progress. It would create a perverse incentive for police departments to merely stamp complaints as unfounded in the assurance that the public would never be able to assess the quality of their internal investigations.