Kathy Hochul, 'Knocked Down'

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s announcement last week of a $229 billion state budget agreement was a coda to several bruising months battling with lawmakers in her party, making clear her political clout has diminished since winning a closer-than-expected election last year.

As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the budget is now a month past due — the latest it’s been in more than a decade. The Democratic governor was forced to drop her marquee plan to spur more housing growth in the face of legislative resistance. Separately, she suffered an unprecedented rebuke when lawmakers rejected her first nominee to lead the state’s court system, Hector LaSalle.

The big takeaway for many at the State Capitol after the past few months is that Hochul—who promised to take a collaborative approach after winning election to her first full term—hasn’t fully utilized the levers of power that come with her office. A more progressive Legislature, meanwhile, has grown more assertive.

“She’s very much a work in progress,” said Larry Levy, a longtime political observer and executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. Hochul should get credit for forcing more changes to the 2019 bail law, but could be faulted for whiffing on housing, he said.

Indeed, after spending her political capital to get the bail changes, “there was little appetite for further compromise on an ambitious housing proposal that was opposed by some of the same suburban lawmakers whose support she desperately needed to push through criminal justice changes,” as Grace Ashford put it in the New York Times.

The governor announced a “conceptual agreement” on Thursday night in the Capitol’s Red Room, after many lawmakers, staff and reporters had gone home. I asked her about the criticisms I’d been hearing, and how she was in something of a trough.

“This is a transformative budget,” she replied. “This state requires a leader who is not afraid to get knocked down once in a while because I always get back up. And I get back up even more committed to take on the challenges.”

We’re not done quite yet. Legislators said they hope to start voting on bills on Monday, but not all of them have been printed. As Politico’s Anna Gronewold and Joe Spector put it, the drawn-out process has “ irritated labor leaders, business interests and her fellow Democrats — and ushered in a new era of dysfunction in Albany.”

“Don’t underestimate the ability for the governor to fuck this all up,” Brooklyn Assemblymember Bobby Carroll, a Democrat, told Politico.

THE QUESTION: I was looking at some Census figures this week for an upcoming project. Without looking it up, do more people live in Springfield, MA or Hartford, CT? And for how long has that been the case?

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: Andrew Cuomo took Franklin D. Roosevelt’s car, a Packard, out of the State Museum so he could drive it on ceremonial occasions. Taxpayers spent $10,440 restoring the vehicle, Jon Campbell reported. I don’t know where the car is now.