The bulk of the mammoth $254 billion state budget deal was unveiled Wednesday with some last minute self-serving quietly slipped into the batter before Albany lawmakers were set to finally vote on it.
The spending plan documents — nicknamed “The Big Ugly” in capital lingo — provide a last-minute, warts-and-all look at much-anticipated legislation focused on New York City’s mental health crisis, recidivism problems and more.
Gov. Kathy Hochul ran a victory lap Wednesday after a deal to revamp the state’s discovery laws — a move to combat a slew of criminal cases that have been getting dismissed on technicalities. The tweaks caused a weeks-long impasse on the overall mammoth budget deal.
“I said all along I would hold up a $250 billion budget on this issue,” she said.
Sources have hinted to The Post that the budget’s final price tag will actually be more than the $254 billion hinted by Hochul.
The discovery changes will prevent criminal cases from being thrown out over trivial mistakes and narrow how much evidence prosecutors must turn over to defense attorneys.
Involuntary commitment standards – the rules by which severely mentally ill people can be forced into psychiatric care against their will – will be expanded and loosened under the agreement.
Hochul and state lawmakers reached the deal after months of backroom talks prompted in part by violence in the subways, random attacks on the city’s streets and Mayor Eric Adams using his bully pulpit to push for changes to involuntary commitment rules.
The budget was due April 1, but it went far over that deadline — a delay that state Sen. Jim Skoufis (D-Orange) lambasted.
“I’m sick and tired of one individual – the Governor – superseding the will of up to 213 duly elected Senators and Assembly Members,” he said in a statement. “The current operating procedure is nothing short of authoritarian.”
Albany’s single-party Democratic rule also let Hochul, state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Westchester) sign off on a slew of self-serving deals for their party faithful.
The state budget package wraps in measures to help incumbents game New York’s new public campaign financing system, allow lawmakers to keep collecting salaries from side jobs and assist Hochul in warding off a challenge from her estranged lieutenant governor.
“All in all, it’s a generally bad Albany at its cynical worst, and we have nothing positive to say about this and how they’ve done this just underlines that these are self-serving changes Democratic incumbents,” John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany, told The Post.
The budget also includes a highly controversial measure pushed by Orthodox Jewish communities that would make it easier for Yeshivas to demonstrate compliance with educational standards that public schools need to meet.
The state Department of Education required non-public schools to demonstrate their curriculums are “substantially equivalent” to those of public schools. A 2023 investigation by the city’s education department found 18 Yeshivas weren’t educating students on basic English and math.
“Despite how people try to characterize this, this is not the elimination of substantial currency,” Hochul told reporters Tuesday.
The new plan will give the non-public schools several other different ways to prove substantial equivalency beyond those outlined by the state education department, which is opposed to the move.
Additional reporting by Haley Brown
