Your One-Stop Guide to the 2024 New York State Budget (2024)

The Division of the Budget staff were dressed in pink. Clustered around a pink chair in the New York State Capitol basem*nt’s indispensable Dunkin’ Donuts, they giddily proclaimed their cause: “Wear pink!” Separate offices within the DOB compete over rates of staff participation, they told New York Focus — like a high school spirit week. As one staffer put it: “It keeps us going.”

Spring in Albany gets off to a slow and arduous start, demanding long hours and whatever motivation budget process participants can muster. The big, eventual promise is a multi-billion-dollar spending package, 10 omnibus bills stuffed with legislation, and some sense of agreement over where New York is headed — at least for the next fiscal year. And now, right on its characteristically delayed schedule, it’s here.

This year’s final budget came together with relatively little fanfare. While some issues saw outcry — rollbacks of rent stabilization, proposed cuts to Medicaid, the death of a major climate proposal — this year’s battles appeared less pitched than many. Is it because it’s an election year, and New York’s Democrats want to project a united front after their disastrous showing in 2022? Or because leadership has tightened its grip on leaks to the press? Is there really just not much to note?

It certainly isn’t the latter. And New York Focus has been keeping a close eye on the state budget fight. We’re identifying the essential changes that readers should know. Peruse our table for a breakdown of state spending, and consult the list below for more detail and analysis of key items.

Topline

Total spending The finalized budget came in at $237 billion — an increase of $8 billion from last year’s agreement. Hochul had originally proposed $233 billion.

The Senate and Assembly had countered with $246 billion proposals in mid-March, funded in part by a proposed over $2 billion in new high-income and corporate taxes. In the end, the budget did not include the tax hikes, and ended closer to the starting figure Hochul had proposed.

Read about other topline figures:

According to the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute, the $237 billion in state spending was an inflation-adjusted decline of 0.4 percent from last year’s total budget.

ReservesThe agreement leaves New York with $19.5 billion in principal reserves. According to a Division of Budget spokesperson, that represents about 14.5 percent of operating funds. Hochul had originally sought $500 million more in reserves.

Hochul has repeatedly touted her administration’s emphasis on maintaining reserves in case of economic downturn, calling 15 percent in reserves the “gold standard” for budgeting. In remarks earlier this month, Hochul noted that in the budget passed in 2020 – before she became governor – principal reserves were at just four percent.

Asylum seekersThe final budget includes over $2.5 billion to house and support tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who have come to New York in recent years. The money will be used to operate temporary shelters, place migrants in permanent housing, and provide social services like legal assistance and medical care, among other initiatives.

Housing

Tax break for developersOne of Hochul’s top priorities this year was replacing a tax break, known as 421-a, that financed most large apartment building construction in New York City before it expired in 2022.

The issue was among the most controversial in this year’s negotiations, as lawmakers, the real estate industry, and labor unions haggled over how much affordable housing the program would require and how much the workers who build and staff the new apartment buildings would be paid.

The final deal offers developers a 40-year exemption from most property taxes. In exchange, they must offer at least 20 percent of new apartments at below-market rents, and on larger projects, pay elevated minimum wages to construction workers that can reach over $70 an hour in the most desirable neighborhoods. The program is slated to expire in 2034.

More housing issues below:

Housing Access Voucher A proposal to create a housing voucher for homeless or precariously housed New Yorkers was once again excluded from the state budget after appearing in both legislative budget proposals.

NYC Housing Regulations The budget includes several measures to lower barriers to new housing in New York City. Most notably, it removes a state-set cap on the size of apartment buildings in the city and creates a tax credit to help developers convert underused offices into housing. At least a quarter of the converted apartments must be affordable for low-income families.

Hochul’s proposal to allow illegal basem*nt apartments to become legal if they are brought up to code did not make it in. In its place, the budget creates a much narrower program that will allow some areas of the city to opt in to allowing such conversions after a community engagement process.

Affordable Housing InsuranceAs the result of a measure advanced by Hochul, housing insurers will be prohibited from considering two factorswhen they decide to insure a building:whether tenants receive government housing vouchers and whether the building contains subsidized units. Insurers will also be barred from increasing the cost of insurance based on these factors.

Pro-Housing Communities The final budget includes a measure that will require towns or cities to become certified as “pro-housing communities” in order to be eligible for $650 million in state grants. There are a few ways toobtain that certification: For example,they could boosttheir housing stock by a set percentage or pass a resolution declaring their pro-housing intentions.

Developing Housing on State Property The budget includes $500 million over two years to fund housing development on state-owned land. Few details about this program are available, and it is likely to be years before any housing constructed using these funds opens for habitation.

Tenants' rights For years, the top priority of New York tenant advocates has been a proposal known as good cause eviction. The budget includes a measure that goes by that name, but is significantly narrower in scope.

The narrowed version included in the budget will protect some tenants from hefty rent hikes by limiting rent increases to no more than 10 percent per year during years when inflation is low. It will also guarantee that covered tenants can renew their leases each year, as long as they stay current on rent and follow the terms of their lease.

The legislation has significant exceptions. Here are some of the largest:

It will initially apply only in New York City, with the option for other towns and cities to vote to opt in.
Landlords who own fewer than 10 apartments — or another cutoff, as determined by localities — are exempt from its requirements.
New buildings are excluded for 30 years.
Coops and condos are excluded.
Landlords can still evict tenants to take apartments off the market entirely.

Tenants rights groups have blasted the legislation as a dramatically weakened version of the original bill. Enforcing the law will be nearly impossible for tenants without lawyers, they charge, since there is no straightforward way for tenants to independently find out how many apartments their landlord owns. The law requires landlords claiming that they’re exempt from the law under this provision to provide tenants with the number and addresses of the units they own, but advocates note that landlords could simply lie.

The budget also includes a measure that will make it easier for landlords of rent-stabilized apartments to hike rents following renovations. Currently, landlords can’t recoup more than $15,000 of their expenses for renovations, paid off over fifteen years. That translates to a maximum monthly rent hike of about $89 per month.

The budget raises those amounts for vacant apartments. Landlords can now recoup $30,000 in renovation expenses, if the last tenant had lived in an apartment for less than 25 years, or $50,000, if the last tenant had lived there for longer.

Education

Higher Education The legislature set aside about $6 billion in funding for the City University of New York and about $13.7 billion for the State University of New York systems. The minimum financial aid award granted via the Tuition Assistance Program, which helps low and middle-income New Yorkers pay for tuition at state universities, will increase from $500 to $1,000. In the highest qualifying bracket, the income eligibility limit will increase from $80,000 to $125,000.

Here's what else you need to know about education:

Foundation aid This year, the state will increase its education spending to $36 billion total, including $24.9 billion in foundation aid.

Throughout the budget fight, Hochul pushed unsuccessfully to change the formula used for foundation aid, which determines how much state funding should go to each school district. Her proposed formula would have resulted in $454 million less in state education spending than planned, and dispensed with the Save Harmless provision, which mandates that school districts can never receive less funding than they did the prior year. Those changes didn’t make it into the budget.

But Hochul isn't giving up entirely. In her Monday speech outlining the initial budget agreement, Hochul announced that the Rockefeller Institute of Government would work with the State Education Department to study the Foundation Aid formula. “They’ll track down where the money is going to waste and how we can get every student the resources they need to learn, to thrive, to succeed,” she said.

Read more about health below:

SUNY Downstate Hochul sparked controversy by proposing a $400 million plan to “transform” SUNY Downstate University Hospital in Brooklyn by closing its facility in East Flatbush, transferring inpatient services to nearby hospitals – and building a new outpatient clinic.

The final agreement will keep the financially struggling hospital open – at least for a year – after the legislature resisted the closure. The deal establishes an advisory board to issue recommendations about the hospital’s future, due on April 1 of next year. The agreement includes $100 million to cover short-term hospital operating costs, and $300 million for capital costs. That $300 million was originally part of Hochul’s plan to build the new outpatient clinic, but it will now be set aside until the board issues its finding.

Mental health services With mental health at the forefront of this year's budget discussions, the final legislation points billions at the issue and changes how health insurance companies reimburse for mental health and substance use disorder treatment.

The Office of Mental Health will receive nearly $3 billion in funding to pass on to localities, a roughly $300 million increase over last year. The vast majority of that will go to adult services: over $1 billion to residential community mental health programs, which can provide people with housing in addition to treatment, and another $449 million to their non-residential counterparts. The budget also sets aside $33 million of the locality funding to "improve public safety" through specialized programs for people who interact with the police and court system. A separate $423.6 million will go to children and youth services.

But the state will also cut the Office of Mental Health’s capital projects budget, which funds new construction and renovations for residential and inpatient facilities, from last year's $1.46 billion to $596 million. To cushion the blow, the state is increasing its borrowing limits for building out mental health infrastructure by roughly $500 million.

The budget also overhauled insurance companies' obligations to cover mental health and substance use treatment. For the first time, private insurers will have to pay for these services at or above minimum rates set by the state Medicaid program. New Yorkers with commercial insurance have historically struggled to find providers that accept their insurance, said Lauri Cole, Executive Director at New York State Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. The change seeks to expand their access to treatment.

PAID COVID LEAVENew York is the only state that still has paid sick leave for Covidin effect — and the budget keeps those protections in place until July of next year. Hochul proposed sunsetting the law this July, but the Senate wanted to keep it in place for health care workers, and the Assembly wanted to preserve the full law indefinitely.

The resulting compromise is that the law will remain in place for another year.It requires large employers to provide at least 14 days of Covid sick leave yearly and medium-sized ones to provide at least five such sick days.

Prenatal leaveThe final budget guarantees pregnant New Yorkers 20 hours of paid prenatal leave to attend medical appointments. Though that’s less than the 40 hours that Hochul originally proposed in January, New York is now the first state in the nation with a mandatory prenatal leave program.

MedicaidThe budget is expected to allocate $37 billion in state funds for Medicaid spending, according to a state Division of Budget spokesperson. The state share of Medicaid spending in last year’s budget was $31.2 billion, and Hochul had proposed in January a state share of $36.1 billion, according to the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Hochul had also proposed $1.2 billion in cuts to Medicaid programs. About $800 million of those cuts have been restored, and will go to reimbursem*nt rate increases and support for financially distressed facilities.

Medicaid funding for hospital services will increase by up to $525 million. Up to $285 million more will go to nursing homes and $15 million to assisted living facilities. About half of those increases are likely to be state-funded.

The final agreement includes a budgetary trick meant to bring in billions of extra Medicaid dollars from the federal government. The legislature’s mid-March proposal said the plan would generate $4 billion, but the final budget does not appear to contain any revenue figure, according to Bill Hammond, a policy fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy. “My impression is they’re leaving it unaddressed because they don’t know,” Hammond said.

Also included: Hochul’s contentious proposal to have a single company oversee a program providing home health care aids to chronically ill or disabled patients. These services are currently provided by hundreds of companies, and the program cost has been increasing rapidly. The shift will “save us $500 million every single year and allow us to start putting controls and guardrails in place,” the governor said on Monday.

Hammond said there will be a bidding process for the statewide contract for home care administration, but it won’t follow the process outlined in state competitive bidding law — and will not involve state comptroller review.

Drug policy

Fighting opioid addictionThe Office of Addiction Services and Supports will receive $960.7 million to spend on aid to help cities and towns combat the opioid epidemic. About $734 million of it will go to community treatment services, while $227 million will go to prevention and program support.

In an unusual move, nearly $40 million of the community treatment allotment will go toward servicing the state’s debt for capital projects. Typically, debt obligations get paid out of a separate allocation, not local aid budgets.

See where else the budget landed on drugs:

Opioid settlement fundsThe budget appropriates $86.2 million to local aid from the state’s opioid settlement fund, the pot of money recovered from pharmaceutical companies for their role in the opioid epidemic. The funding will be spent on a blend of responses to the overdose crisis, including housing, treatment, and harm reduction. About $26 million of the total will go straight to municipalities, which will have broad discretion over how to use the funds.

Overdose Prevention Centers Perhaps predictably, the most controversial strategy for stopping drug overdoses was dropped from the final budget.

Overdose prevention centers allow people to use illicit drugs under the supervision of medical staff. There are only two currently operating in New York, both in Manhattan. According to the organization that runs them, OnPoint NYC, the sites had reversed at least a thousand overdoses as of last August.

The Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Board — which advises the state on how to spend money recovered from settlements with drug manufacturers and distributors over their role in the opioid epidemic — has recommended using some of the legal windfall to fund the centers twice over the past two years. Both times, Chinazo Cunningham, Hochul’s commissioner for addiction services, claimed that doing so would violate state and federal law. This year, the Senate suggested appropriating some of the opioid settlement funds for the centers anyway, but Hochul won out in the final budget.

Scheduling fentanyl analogsThe final budget doesn’t include new drug criminalization measures after the legislature rejected Hochul’s proposal.

The governor’s plan, which mirrored policies passed in last year’s budget, would have added xylazine and additional fentanyl analogs to the state’s schedules of controlled substances, criminalizing their possession and sale. In an apparent change of heart from last year, both the Senate and Assembly excluded the provision from their budget proposals.

Advocates have pushed against scheduling new substances for years, arguing that it expands the war on drugs and does little to solve the underlying issues that lead to drug use.

Drug Checking ServicesA proposal to help people test their drugs before using them was excluded from the final budget.

The Senate’s proposal to create drug-checking services would have required the Office of Addiction Services and Supports to connect people with contracted vendors to test their drugs while giving legal immunity to providers and clients.

Proponents of the effort argue that it would not only have helped people use substances more safely, but also let officials collect data on the drug supply so they could react more quickly.

In its response to the opioid crisis, New York has struggled to keep up with changes in the drug supply. The state Department of Health found that the fentanyl analog xylazine was involved in one-fifth of all fentanyl-related deaths in New York City in 2021, but didn't release that information until a year and a half later.

The legislature will try another route: A standalone bill to create drug-checking services moved out of the Senate health committee last week and will now go before the finance committee.

Dispensaries After years of losing money to an unregulated black market, the state will arm local governments with new authority to crack down on illicit cannabis dispensaries. Cities and counties can now pass laws granting themselves broad discretion to close unregistered storefronts, seize their assets, and bring civil proceedings against the operators.

Under current law, only the state Office of Cannabis Management and Department of Taxation and Finance can investigate and shut down unregistered dispensaries.

While news reports say that anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 illegal dispensaries have cropped up, no one has an accurate estimate, according to the Office of Cannabis Management’s director of enforcement.

What’s clear is that New York is hemorrhaging potential tax revenue from cannabis. In 2018, when legalization was first on the table, New York City’s then-comptroller, Scott Stringer, predicted that the state could reap up to $436 million in annual taxes from it, but Hochul’s financial plan projected just $70 million in non-medical cannabis revenue over this past fiscal year.

Hochul included a version of the measure in her January budget proposal, as did the Senate.

Assembly Spikes Biggest Climate Proposal in New York Budget

Julia Rock and Colin Kinniburgh

Climate and environment

SuperfundThe biggest climate funding item on the table did not make the budget. The Climate Change Superfund Act, modeled after the federal superfund law that requires polluters to clean up the environmental messes they’ve made, would impose a fee on fossil fuel companies for their past carbon emissions. Legislators estimate that it would raise $3 billion annually from fossil fuel companies to fund climate adaptation projects. Similar legislation has been proposed in three other states.

The Senate included the measure in its budget proposal last month — having already passed it as a standalone bill last year — and the Assembly expressed openness to it. But Hochul did not budge. Advocates will keep pushing to pass the bill before the end of the legislative session in June.

Here are some other climate initiatives that got kept out of the budget — and some that managed to squeak through:

Weaning off natural gas New York’s climate law requires the state to largely phase out fossil fuels by 2050. But an older law requires utilities to supply gas to any customer who wants it — and subsidizes the gas system’s expansion.

A landmark proposal to resolve this contradiction and wean the state off gas — the NY HEAT Act — was the biggest climate item on the budget table this year. Both the governor and Senate backed it. The Assembly did not, and National Fuel, an upstate gas utility, lobbied heavily against it. It didn’t make the final budget.

Funding for clean water Since 2017, New York has spent $500 million a year upgrading its drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. This year, Hochul sought to cut that in half by stretching the spending across two years. The Senate and the Assembly, backed by a chorus of environmental advocates, roundly rebuffed the attempt, and prevailed in the final budget. New York will again spend a half-billion dollars on water infrastructure over the coming year.

Accelerating transmission for renewables New York is far behind on its mandate to build renewables, and that’s partly because there aren’t enough power lines to move new clean energy to where it’s most needed. This year, Hochul proposed to build power lines faster by moving the permitting process to the purview of the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES). The legislature sought significant changes to Hochul’s proposal, adding labor protections and, most controversially, a slew of new requirements for energy projects built on farmland.

The bulk of the Assembly’s proposed labor language made it into the final budget deal. Virtually all publicly funded energy projects will now need to pay union-level wages, use US-made iron and steel, and enter into “labor peace agreements.” The farmland protections, which the Senate was pushing, did not make the final cut, nor did the chamber's proposal to expand ORES’s mandate to include battery storage. The final budget does require more public input and legislative oversight than Hochul originally proposed.

RENEWABLE ENERGY TAX CREDIT The budget does not include a proposal from the Senate to increase tax credits for residential solar and geothermal energy, a boost that had been sought by climate hawks. Under current law, homeowners can receive a tax credit of up to $5,000 for installing solar or geothermal energy equipment. The Senate’s initial budget proposal would have doubled the maximum credit and made it fully refundable, meaning people could receive it as a refund if it was larger than what they owed in taxes.

While the state dropped the expansion, the federal government announced on April 22 that New York would be receiving a $250 million grant to help low-income households install rooftop solar.

The budget did include a small boost to residential energy storage projects, making them exempt from sales taxes.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION FUND The final budget does not include Hochul’s plan to divert funding from the Environmental Protection Fund, a pool of money dedicated to land conservation, parks, climate, and other environmental projects. Continuing a long Albany tradition, the governor sought to allocate a portion of its cash to staffing and other costs of administering the fund. As usual, the legislature rejected the effort, on the grounds that the fund is strictly intended to pay for the one-time “capital” expenses of these projects, not administration, which is funded elsewhere in the budget. The fund will get a clean $400 million, like last year.

UTILITY BILL ASSISTANCE An Assembly proposal to infuse $200 million into energy affordability programs, administered by utilities, did not make it into the final budget. New Yorkers are still digging themselves out of a mountain of utility bill debt, which peaked during the pandemic and has barely dipped. According to filings reviewed by the Public Utility Law Project, some 1.3 million households owe the state’s major energy utilities a combined $1.7 billion, an average of more than $1,200 per household. This budget season saw a few proposals aimed at reducing that burden, including the NY HEAT Act. But the Assembly proposal was the most direct.

Lawmakers did approve a separate $50 million for a green retrofit program called EmPower+, so that participating households’ utility bills are capped at six percent of their incomes.

Kathy Hochul’s Copy-and-Paste Crime-Fighting Formula

Chris Gelardi

Criminal Justice

Police Funding While Hochul has centered this year’s justice policy push on retail theft, she doubled funding for the state's response to gun crime for the third year in a row. The Gun Involved Violence Elimination program, or GIVE, which funnels money to aggressive gun policing units around the state, will now get $72 million in state funds.

A core part of the GIVE program is police intelligence, which runs largely through the Crime Analysis Center Network. The series of 11 regional hubs conduct surveillance and provide intelligence to local and federal law enforcement. This year, Hochul pushed through $33 million in funding for the network, up from $18 million last year.

Here's what else changed — and what didn't:

Reform Legislation No major criminal justice reform proposals made it into this year's budget.

The Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act, which Hochul vetoed last year and the Senate included in its budget proposal, would have made it easier for people who took plea deals to appeal their convictions, including by introducing new DNA evidence. The End Predatory Court Fees Act, also pushed by the Senate, would have banned court fees and associated penalties, namely incarcerating people for failing to pay them and garnishing unpaid fees from prison commissary accounts. And the Connecting Families Act, included in the Assembly’s proposal, would have made prison phone calls and other communications free.

Prison Closures The state’s prison population is less than half of what it was a few decades ago, and the prison system doesn’t have enough staff for all of its facilities. The budget will make it easier for New York to keep closing facilities: The governor will be able to close up to five prisons over the next year with only 90 days’ notice, a fraction of the legally mandated year-long process.

Bail and Discovery There are no changes to bail or discovery law in this year’s budget — leaving a major area of conflict from past years untouched.

Since Hochul became governor, budget negotiations have often gotten stuck on the status of New York’s 2019 criminal justice reforms. The governor has forced through legal changes to make it easier to keep people in jail, and she’s sought unsuccessfully to roll back requirements for prosecutors to share evidence with the defense in a timely manner.

Last year, Hochul declared that she was finished pushing for reform rollbacks in the budget. This year, she kept her word.

Retail theft crackdown Every year, Hochul throws the policy boot at a crime topic that’s in the news. This year, it’s retail theft.

She won seemingly every item she proposed — a policy list she virtually copy-and-pasted from her gun crime initiatives from previous years’ budgets. State budget bills will make assaulting a retail worker a felony and establish criminal penalties for knowingly fostering the sale of stolen items. They’ll also allow authorities to charge people with felony grand larceny if they’re alleged to have committed multiple thefts as part of a “common scheme or plan” — even if they weren’t against the same retailer. And Hochul will direct $40 million from the budget to local police, prosecutors, and the State Police to crack down on retail theft.

New hate crimes Hochul also managed to increase the number of offenses that can be categorized as hate crimes, automatically raising them to “violent felony” status. As a result of the elevated severity, people who are found guilty of these crimes may have years added to their sentences. The budget will add dozens of new offenses — including falsely reporting an incident, weapons possession infractions, and certain sex crimes — to the list of eligible hate crimes.

Taxes

Tax Credits for Families: Families with children will see an increase to the child tax credit payment they receive from New York this fall. Some lawmakers had sought to overhaul the system by increasing the maximum credit from $330 to $550 and extending that maximum to the poorest families, who are excluded from receiving it under existing law. The final budget did not include these measures.

Instead, the budget provides a one-year supplement to the existing Empire State Child Credit. Under the byzantine payment structure, a family’s credit this year is determined by their income and the size of the credit they received in 2023. The total credit amount will vary widely, but will be largest for low-income families, and smaller for the poorest and higher-income families. (The state passed a similar, one-year supplemental payment in the 2022 budget.)

More taxes (and attempts):

No Taxing the rich One thing that won't be in this year's budget: a new tax on the wealthy. The Senate and Assembly proposed $2 billion worth of tax hikes on ultra-high-income New Yorkers and large corporations for this year’s state budget, while Hochul repeatedly pledged that she would not approve any increased taxes. The governor won out. The budget will not raise any income or corporate taxes.

Economic Policy

Media tax creditAt least 40 percent of New York's newspapers have shuttered in the last two decades. The budget creates a first-in-the-nation program to staunch the bleeding by offering newsrooms hefty tax credits for employing journalists.

Newspapers and broadcast media organizations can apply for as much as $300,000 each in tax credits covering half of the first $50,000 of full-time salaries — up to $25,000 in state support for each job. They can also get $5,000 for new hires, up to $20,000. The total pot is capped each year at $30 million, which could run out fast.

And more economic programs:

Empire AI Hochul wants to make New York the nation’s leader in artificial intelligence research. The final budget will set aside $275 million in state funds to launch Empire AI, an artificial intelligence research consortium headquartered at the University at Buffalo.

$250 million of that funding will go to capital grants. $25 million over ten years will go to State University of New York.

SHOVEL-READY SITES The final budget includes $100 million for the Focused Attraction of Shovel-Ready Tracts New York, or FAST NY, program.

Hochul created the program in 2022 to use state funds to develop shovel-ready sites, like the STAMP industrial park in Genesee County. A site is shovel-ready when the necessary infrastructure and permitting are already in place, making it easier for an interested business to set up shop. The state markets these sites to a variety of industries — including high-tech manufacturing and renewable energy — in hopes the projects will create jobs and bolster local economies.

WAGE THEFTNo new provisions to tackle wage theft made it into the budget. The Hochul administration has said that the issue is a top priority, even as the Labor Department has lagged in recovering stolen wages.

Hochul’s January budget proposal included a modest reform to crack down on wage theft, and the Senate backed a more robust plan to strengthen enforcement against wage theft. They could now be considered as standalone bills during the final weeks of the legislative session.

DISABILITY BENEFITSA measure to boost disability benefits for New Yorkers temporarily unable to work was excluded from the budget, even though Hochul and both houses of the legislature proposed a version of it earlier this year.

Currently, the maximum weekly disability benefit is $170, an amount that hasn’t changed since 1989. Hochul’s proposal would have boosted it to over $1,100 by 2029. The Senate proposed a similar measure with a slightly faster timeline and more expansive benefits. The differences were not bridged during budget negotiations, and the proposal was eventually dropped.

Senator Jessica Ramos, who sponsors a standalone bill to raise disability benefits significantly,told the Albany Times-Union that getting this change done will be a “top priority” of hers for the remainder of the legislative session.

Transportation

FARE AND TOLL EVASIONAs New York City gets ready to implement congestion pricing this summer, lawmakers approved a suite of new powers to crack down on toll and fare evaders. Drivers who deface or mask their license plates will face fines ranging from $100 to $500, and the DMV will have the power to suspend repeat offenders’ licenses. The legislation also bans the sale of license plate covers.

It’s more lax than Hochul’s original proposal: For example, it doesn’t reclassify toll evasion as a crime, as the governor had sought. It also requires tolling authorities to improve how they communicate with drivers about violations and strengthens drivers’ right to appeal.

The budget also stiffens penalties for fare evaders in the transit system. Fines for repeat offenders can now reach $150; until now, they were fixed at $100 for each violation, regardless of how many times a straphanger had been caught evading the fare. On the flip side, a first offense will now be met with a written warning rather than a summons.

Other changes to transportation law:

New York City Bus ServiceIn another step intended to prepare New York City for congestion pricing, lawmakers want to ensure that its transit system is ready to welcome more passengers. To that end, they secured just over $12 million in new funding for buses, aiming to increase service and reliability on about 20 routes.

That sum is far less than the Senate and Assembly's original ask. The legislature had requested$90 million to be split evenly between expanding the MTA’s fare-free pilot — to cover a total of 15 lines over the next year — and improving service on other lines.

The final budget deal did not extend or expand the fare-free program.Later this year,riders on the five currently free lines will have to go back to paying.

Lower speed limits in New York City Lawmakers reached a deal giving New York City the power to lower speed limits to 20 miles per hour, or 15 mph in school zones. Major thoroughfares outside Manhattan with three or more lanes in either direction will be exempt. Some advocates have raised concerns that this will leave out some of the deadliest roads in the rest of the city.

Still, the budget deal was a hard-fought win for safe streets advocates, who have been championing “Sammy’s Law” — named after a 12-year-old killed by a driver in Brooklyn — for nearly four years.

What else?

Public campaign finance The final budget allocates $100 million in public matching funds for New York's new campaign finance program, through which the state will match and multiply donations up to $250 for candidates in Assembly, Senate and statewide races, offsetting the influence of big donors.

Last year, some Democrats privately expressed concern that the program would hurt incumbents or help Republicans in swing districts. They passed a bill in June that sought to make the program more favorable to incumbents by dramatically increasing the size of the donation that could be matched, but Hochul vetoed it in December.

Democratic state Senator James Skoufis recently introduced legislation incorporating many of the elements from the bill Hochul vetoed, while excluding the controversial matching funds provision. Skoufis’s proposal did not make it into the budget agreement, but could be in play during the remainder of the legislative session.

More miscellany:

Liquor law reform The budget includes several items recommended by a liquor law reform commission last year, including a five-year extension of a law allowing to-go alcohol from bars and restaurants. A number of the commission's more sweeping legislative changes were not included, including changing a law restricting an entity in one tier of the alcohol industry from having an interest in another tier; and allowing the same person to own more than one wine or liquor store in New York.

The final agreement also features a provision allowing the sale of spirits at movie theaters, which the commission did not recommend.

Authorities Budget Office The final budget includes an additional $298,000 for the Authorities Budget Office (ABO), the watchdog agency for New York state’s nearly 600 public authorities. The agency’s funding will now sit at $3.65 million.

Your One-Stop Guide to the 2024 New York State Budget (2024)

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