ALBANY — Can't someone else do it?
Gov. Hochul kicked off the state's budget process on Tuesday by doing exactly the opposite of what you do when you make a budget, instead ducking any responsibility for finding the $33 billion that is missing from the MTA's capital plan ... and growing it by a couple billion dollars on top of that.
The governor actually began the day by suggesting that the MTA was working on a revised capital plan to replace the one that state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie vetoed at the last possible moment on Christmas Eve.
"The MTA is developing an updated capital plan to propose to me and the legislature, and once we receive it, we will determine the best way to fund it," the governor said while unveiling her Fiscal Year 2026 budget.
A spokesperson for the governor later cleaned up the remarks by saying that the MTA would resubmit its plan to members of the Capital Program Review Board, a relatively obscure panel made up of the governor, Assembly Speaker and state Senate Majority Leader that passes final judgment on every proposed MTA capital plan. Any one of the panelists can veto the plan.
The MTA does need to submit another capital plan for CPRB approval, but the agency can legally simply submit the same plan that was rejected by Heastie and Stewart-Cousins, who had not objected to any specific pieces of the plan, but threw it out entirely because of the $33-billion funding hole.
A confusing day upstate
Assembly and Senate leaders have maintained that they want to figure out how to find the money, but haven't said anything about ripping up the plan and starting again. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday before Hochul's budget press conference, Stewart-Cousins sounded like she was waiting for Hochul to make the first move in the budget process that's typically dominated by whoever is in the governor's mansion.
"We'll see what she actually puts in," Stewart-Cousins said when asked how the conversation around funding the MTA will begin. "Whoever starts [the conversation], we've gotta get an answer. Everybody knows that. We will figure that out."
Hochul seems insistent that the answer comes from the Assembly and Senate. Blake Washington, the governor's budget director, placed additional responsibility for plugging the budget hole directly at Heastie's and Stewart-Cousins's feet.
"What the governor was trying to say is that, obviously, we're going to have to partner with the legislature and the MTA to land the plane on a new plan," Washington said on Tuesday. "[The MTA] obviously are professional people, and they have to adapt to the realities before them. The realities are the state legislature vetoed their first plan, so it's incumbent upon [the MTA] to do engagement and outreach with the legislature and say, 'If it's not this, what it what will it be? What works?'"
Hochul's main offer so far for the capital plan has been to slash the amount of money both the state and city are supposed to give to it. In September, MTA Chief Financial Officer Kevin Willens said that the agency expected the state and city to chip in $4 billion each.
But Hochul's budget only assumes the state and city will give $3 billion each, turning a $33-billion funding gap into a $35-billion funding gap with the stroke of a pen. Washington said that Hochul was just repeating the same exact amount from the last plan, one that was $17 billion cheaper, and that it's up to the legislature to decide on more state and city aid.
"If you saw the budget requests that I get from state agencies, every state agency asks for certain things. Every state agency, every public authority, has a a certain set of expectations. The legislation. Naturally, the legislature is going to look at the financial plan, they're going to say, 'Well, you know, it's $3 billion here. Can I plus up another billion dollars, or do I really need that for something else?' That's all part of the negotiation," Washington said.
Hochul's attempt to make this situation the legislature's problem flies directly in the face of what she said about the capital plan over the last couple of months. At her November press conference, she announced her full support for the next five-year renovation plan.
"I'm telegraphing my support for the capital plan, to show my commitment to long-term investments that nobody else had the guts to do, because it is tough. It is tough to do this, and it's so easy to kick the can down the road. It is so easy to do that, and it's not something I'm prepared to do," the governor said.
Hochul also gave herself props for supporting a theory of the capital plan in a Dec. 22 interview with ABC7.
"Governors before me have not had the courage to spend the money necessary to invest in new [train] cars, invest in the cameras, invest with accessibility for people with disabilities and moms with strollers," she said.
Hochul and her administration's attempt to use the CPRB veto as a cudgel against state legislators could be read as smart politics, but advocates pointed out that this predictable and exhausting staring contest only winds up hurting people who actually ride the bus and train.
"This is an abdication of the governor’s responsibility to millions of Downstate transit riders and puts the engine of the state economy at risk," Reinvent Albany said in a review of Hochul's budget. "The governor is playing a dangerous game of political chicken with the legislature to see who will be the grown-up in Albany."
