New York lawmakers are back home after wrapping up their least-productive legislative session since the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.
Legislators adjourned just after 8 pm Friday, making an early exit from the Capitol to allow more time to campaign in primary elections scheduled for June 23. It’s the earliest scheduled exit since 2022.
Lawmakers passed dozens of bills in the final hours, but most of their January-to-June session was sucked up by negotiating changes to the $268 billion state budget. The budget was fully adopted on May 27 — almost two months after the April 1 deadline.
The result was a single week of votes dominated by changes to electoral issues. Legislators who had hoped for long debates on other complex topics found themselves losing a race with the clock.
“We were at a place in the last week where we had to put 100 pounds of policy and bills into a five-pound period,” said Assemblymember Josh Jensen, a Rochester-area Republican. “Unfortunately, that means that some good public policy that has bipartisan support might not make it over the finish line.”
A total of 759 bills passed both houses this year, according to an analysis by the New York Public Interest Research Group, or NYPIRG. That’s the lowest tally since the Covid-19 pandemic upended legislating in 2020, and lower than the average of 891 bills advanced during each year of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s tenure, NYPIRG said.
The highest-profile items this year were a constitutional amendment that would let New York enter the national redistricting wars and a one-year moratorium on the construction of large data centers.
Lawmakers passed a bill to prohibit businesses from using personal data to tailor prices to individual customers in New York, cracking down on a practice critics have called “surveillance pricing.”
Many other bills passed with little debate and broad support. They included measures to create task forces and tweak pension benefits for individual state employees. Other offbeat proposals, like a measure mandating stores round cash charges to the nearest nickel as the penny is phased out, drew attention but not much dissent.
Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Yonkers Democrat, said she felt the session accomplished her aims.
“Even though there's an uncertainty in terms of the budget duration, there was a certainty about our agenda,” she said. “So, I can say that I'm leaving here feeling that we've accomplished the important things that we needed to accomplish.”
Tenant advocacy groups expressed displeasure that lawmakers didn’t take up a bill that would have made it easier to enact systems of rent control in upstate cities. State Sen. James Skoufis said he was disappointed lawmakers simply extended the state’s ticket scalping law without adding any caps on fees or restrictions on price hikes.
“I understand that especially on the Assembly side, this issue was a casualty of the late budget. as they're figuring out what issues big and small can and cannot wait,” the Orange County Democrat said.
Legislators also took a pass on two key bills favored by environmental organizations.
One would have required companies to reduce their single-use plastic packaging by 30% over the next 12 years. The second bill would have doubled the state’s current 5-cent deposit on many bottles and cans while expanding the list of beverages to which it would apply.
State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat, said there weren’t enough votes in his conference to pass the packaging measure in his chamber. He said his members had concerns about the costs companies would face to comply.“ I'm a yes on the bill,” Heastie said of the packaging legislation. “But you need 76 yesses to pass a bill, and we don't have that.”
Heastie said the ticketing legislation wasn’t considered because lawmakers didn’t have “have enough time to resolve all of the issues.”
Blair Horner, a senior policy adviser for NYPIRG, said Heastie and Stewart-Cousins had inordinate power during the compressed end-of-session period.
“At a certain level, you just overwhelm the system,” he said. “You have so much pent-up demand, so little time, issues that maybe are necessary and needed but are too controversial to gobble up a half a day to get it done, unless the leadership wants to do it. So, on redistricting and those kinds of issues, they make the time. But on issues dealing with things like a mere solid waste crisis, not so much time.”
Anthony Dixon made several trips to the Capitol to urge lawmakers to pass legislation making it easier for incarcerated people to get parole hearings. None of them were taken up, in part because he said lawmakers were being “timid” during an election year.
“We’re not giving up,” Dixon said, noting other legislation limiting the use of solitary confinement took years of lobbying. “When they did not pass it each year, it gained more votes and got more support behind it.”
Jensen, the Republican assemblymember, said competitive primaries this month between incumbent Democrats drove a lot of the action on legislation that advanced as well as bills that were left to flounder.
He said there was no reason that the Legislature couldn’t reconvene later in the year – perhaps after elections in November.
“I’m not saying that I want to be going through the summer,” he said, “but I think it would make sense.”
Jon Campbell and Samuel King contributed reporting.
