Mr. Heastie said<\/a>\u00a0in early June. That\u2019s odd, considering the bill has 77 Assembly co-sponsors in a chamber of 150 seats.\u00a0<\/p>\nThe 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\u2019s risks to public health, this bill was a chance to stem the tide and\u00a0cut waste costs for municipalities.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 a nickel in 1982, when the original bottle bill was enacted \u2014 is worth 17 cents today). Bottle redemption centers \u2014 necessary for the return system to work \u2014 aren’t making enough to stay open. Without more investment, one of New York\u2019s top recycling success stories is headed toward failure.<\/p>\n
Speaking of outdated numbers: The current minimum SNAP allowance\u00a0is $24 a month for a one- or two-person household.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.<\/p>\n
The minimum allowance was never supposed to cover everything, of course, but these days it doesn\u2019t 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 \u2014 and it would have been all the more valuable in the face of federal benefit cuts.<\/p>\n
Purchasing an “event contract\u201d on a prediction market\u00a0isn’t at all\u00a0the same as placing a wager in a New York casino. Heavens, no. After all, casinos are strictly regulated.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
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\u2019s just, as state Attorney General Letitia James has put it, \u201cillegal gambling by another name.\u201d Her office is pushing back in the courts \u2014 but lawmakers missed the chance to lay down some regulations on the markets, which are only going to grow.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 how many requests received and how they were resolved \u2014 so the public can see how well they comply with open records laws.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And while\u00a0the 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\u00a0that \u201cprovides for the sealing of unfounded, exonerated, and pending claims made against law enforcement officers\u201d\u00a0that would have allowed for these claims to be redacted\u00a0from disciplinary records.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Capitol is reflected in a window at Albany City Hall on June 1, 2026. Will Waldron\/Times Union…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,304,9,24,63,12522,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-264515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-editorial","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-opiniontu","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}