Budget, Bail and the Bills
New York lawmakers blew past the deadline to adopt a state budget, stumbling over proposals to amend the state’s bail law, spend $600 million on a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills and thousands of other lines in the $200-plus billion spending plan that was due at midnight on Thursday.
As I reported last week in The Wall Street Journal, Gov. Kathy Hochul is pushing her fellow Democrats in the state Assembly and Senate to let judges set bail for more repeat offenders, as well as for people who are accused of a larger list of gun crimes. If adopted, New York would become the biggest state to pull back on progressive criminal-justice policies, some of which have come under attack amid a nationwide rise in violent crime.
Supporters of the law say it has helped reduce racial disparities in the criminal justice system and is not the major driver of crime in the state. New York City data show that roughly 5% of people who are released ahead of their trial are rearrested, and about 1% are rearrested for a violent felony, according to an analysis by New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. The percentages remained nearly identical after the state law took effect, his report said.
Republicans have used the new bail law and other progressive-backed criminal justice initiatives in their campaigns against Democrats since the 2020 elections. Several high-profile incidents of repeat offenders — like a man accused of smearing poop on a subway rider — have also gotten significant media attention.
It seems to have shifted public opinion against the law: As many as 56% of voters surveyed this month by the Siena College Research Institute said they believed the law was bad for New York, compared with 38% of respondents who said in 2019 the law would be bad after its enactment.
“There is near-universal agreement that the bail law should be amended to give judicial discretion, while at the same time, a majority are concerned that providing discretion could lead to unjust incarcerations. Good luck, governor and legislators,” poll spokesman Steven Greenberg said.
Lawmakers were dealing with this conflict when the governor last week announced a deal to use $850 million in public money to construct a $1.4 billion stadium for the Buffalo Bills adjacent to their 50-year-old facility in Orchard Park. The Bills promised to stay in Erie County for at least 30 more years, which should give them time to lose a few more Super Bowls — perhaps consecutively.
Economists say stadiums are not the best investment of public dollars, as Chris Churchill wrote in the Albany Times Union, and a poll taken last week showed a majority of state voters opposed the plan. That includes some downstate progressives who hold power in the state Legislature, like state Sen. Liz Krueger. “This seems beyond excessive to help billionaires,” she told me. Officials in Buffalo said the Bills would have left but for the subsidized stadium, and that the team is an important economic and psychological driver in the region.
The stadium deal is certainly a priority for Hochul, the first Buffalo resident in more than a century to be governor. She didn’t appear publicly to talk about the agreement last week, but said in a statement that she was pleased the new facility would be constructed with union labor and “New Yorkers can rest assured that their investment will be recouped by the economic activity the team generates."
Buffalo News columnist Rod Watson points out that putting the stadium in Orchard Park represents a missed opportunity to move it back into the City of Buffalo, which is undergoing a Rust Belt renaissance.
“To spend that much money in the third-poorest city in the United States, we have to get something out of it other than just keeping the Bills here,” Benjamin Siegel, an architectural designer and leader of the Bills in Buffalo committee, told me.
COMING UP: New York’s electoral calendar could be shaken up after a judge in Steuben County on Thursday ruled that Democrat-drawn legislative districts (you read about them here) violated the State Constitution’s anti-gerrymandering provisions. This case will likely go to the Court of Appeals, the state’s top judicial body, in the coming weeks.
If the districts are rejected, it will mean candidates have to re-circulate nominating petitions within new boundaries. That will force lawmakers to come up with a new date for primary elections, which are now scheduled for June 28 but could be pushed back until August.
THE QUESTION: What’s the largest spending area in New York’s state budget?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: Hartford was founded by the Rev. Thomas Hooker in 1636. I know this because my father, who grew up in the 860, had a “Hartford was Founded by a Hooker” sweatshirt and adolescent me had questions. There’s also a brewery named for him – anybody had their beer? Is it any good?