Timing isn't everything when spinning a budget
Alongside Long Island homeowners and officials, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed the 2014-15 state budget at LIU Post in Brookville on April 1, 2014. He kept to a grand slam theme for producing the fourth straight on-time budget, handing out autographed baseballs. Credit: Newsday / John Paraskevas
On May 7, more than a month into the start of the state fiscal year, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced an agreement on a new annual budget.
Minutes later, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie — whose leadership role gives him a lot to say about that — declared "There's no budget deal" because major issues and spending details had yet to be ironed out. Hochul had acknowledged it was conceptual, and "the final details" will be worked out.
On Wednesday — nearly two weeks after Hochul's half-baked announcement — lawmakers finally began voting on the first bills which included the new calculations for state aid to local school districts. It was a day after the public voted on school budgets. And 11th-hour knots over the proposed legislation were arising as additions were reportedly made and some matters were still disputed.
Which proves — for the millionth time to longtime observers — that no legislative deal, even if it doesn't involve thousands of pages, is truly done until enacted into law. Those underrated "final details" can trip up or derail a $268 billion-plus spending plan.
So as it turns out, weeks ago Hochul was essentially shouting "last call, all aboard" and blowing the train whistle before the locomotive was really leaving the station. What was the plan?
For one thing, by announcing when she did, her team seized an opportunity to grab a solo spotlight and say, without interference from other political players, that Hochul's signature initiatives were a fait accompli in the budget over which she has key control.
This appears to have been a move for momentum, perhaps to eclipse the fact that it was going to be the latest Albany spending plan since 2010. That happens to be the year Andrew M. Cuomo was first elected governor. He made on-time budgets a big deal early in his tenure, touting how state government was emerging from a period of disorder.
The real significance of having a budget agreement in time for the start of the new fiscal year can be, and has been, debated. Cuomo's late father, Gov. Mario Cuomo, touted the urgency of prompt fiscal agreements for years.
In December 1991 the elder Cuomo stood before a bank of TV cameras and radio and print reporters and announced — to much skepticism — that the reason he could not run for president was attributable to the alleged refusal of GOP Senate Majority Leader Ralph Marino of Nassau County to help him close an immediate $875 million deficit in the state budget and a bigger $3.6 billion gap for the following year.
Suggesting Marino had an impact on the Democrats' presidential field might have been the most famous and surprising instance in the history of Albany budget spin.
Here in 2026, Hochul's rationale for blowing past April 1 is an interesting question. Her allies may argue going forward that the delay showed she was standing tough and not caving in to bids by lawmakers and lobbyists to add expensive initiatives.
Will voters even remember by November, when all state offices are open for election, that 13 consecutive stopgap extenders had to be passed in order to keep the state government going — amid conflicting accounts of what constituted a done deal? So far this doesn't sound like a game-changer, just a standard Albany tale.
Columnist Dan Janison's opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
