Despite New York’s delayed budget, state lawmakers are passing bills at the highest rate since 2022, according to new data.
This year’s budget is the most delayed in the last decade, but Rachael Fauss, senior policy adviser for Reinvent Albany, said lawmakers appear to be adapting to a longer budget process.
“The first year of the legislative session is when bills are all reintroduced, they get new numbers, and they go through the process,” Fauss said. “So, the second year, any bill that passed the first year that didn’t end up on the governor’s desk, it seems like that gets put in the queue to get passed pretty quickly.”
Still, New York does not have a strong track record for passing new bills. A Reinvent Albany analysis of 2023-24 session data found only 11% of bills introduced in either chamber of the Legislature became law.
Some leaders in Albany predict the budget will be completed after Memorial Day. If that happens, lawmakers would have only one more week to pass bills before the legislative session ends.
While the delayed state budget is not preventing bills from passing, it is affecting other areas, including local school district budgets.
Part of New York’s budget includes School Aid Runs, which detail how much money districts receive from the state. But most school districts already had their budgets approved in local votes this week.
Fauss said it would be helpful if school districts knew what to expect.
“Even if the state budget wasn’t 100% locked down, I assume these budgets went through with their best guess as to what the state might give them,” she said. “So hopefully, they’re getting good information from the state.”
This is the sixth year in a row New York’s state budget is late. Lawmakers are considering changes to improve the process, including expanding the Legislature’s power to amend the governor’s budget. That power was weakened by the Silver v. Pataki and Pataki v. Assembly court cases in the early 2000s.
Fauss said that while some budget process changes can be regulated, the culture of developing the budget also needs to change.
“The discussion of policy ideas being inserted into the budget, rather than dealing with the numbers and the dollars and cents, has come up a lot,” she said. “But the big question is, how do you legislate that?”
Edwin is a reporter and producer in North Tonawanda, New York. He’s previously reported for the Niagara Gazette and the Ithaca Times. Edwin got an early start in radio interning for WBFO-88.7FM, NPR’s Buffalo affiliate. In 2018, he graduated from SUNY Buffalo State College with a B.A. in Journalism, and in 2022, graduated from Syracuse University with an M.S. in Communications.