Nearly two months past deadline, New York finally has a state budget.
Lawmakers cast the final votes to pass a roughly $269 billion state budget late Wednesday night — the latest approval in nearly two decades.
Passage was delayed by a variety of contentious policy issues. Many of those were priorities of Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is running for re-election this fall. In the last budget of her first full term, she successfully pushed to reform auto insurance, streamline state level environmental reviews and delay mandated climate goals.
Yet the lateness of the budget frustrated many in the Legislature, who will now have just one week to try to pass their own priorities before the 2026 session is scheduled to end.
Even so, the budget does include things pushed by the Legislature, including a sweeter pension deal for police personnel, teachers and firefighters. There are also new taxes on multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City and nicotine pouches.
Here are six key things to know about the budget, and why it’s about a lot more than money.
New York shirks its climate leader status
New York is not on track to achieve the goals laid out in the ambitious 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The budget offers two means of addressing that.
One way is a fresh $1 billion allocation to develop renewables. The other — insisted upon by Ms. Hochul — rewrites the fine print to make the goals easier to reach. Because some of the climate goals may drive up consumer costs, the governor may be betting that voters may be more concerned by their own finances than fossil fuels come November.
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