New York state is joining tech giant IBM and semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology to invest $10 billion in a state-of-the-art chip research facility at the University of Albany, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced.
NY Creates, a nonprofit entity that oversees The Albany NanoTech Complex where the 50,000-square-foot facility will be built, will supervise the project, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Upon its completion in 2026, the facility is expected to include some of the most advanced chip-making equipment in the world courtesy of ASML Holding, a Dutch company that sells machines worth upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars, The Journal reported.
Once the machinery is installed, the project and its partners — including material-engineering company Applied Materials and electronics firm Tokyo Electron — will work on next-generation chip manufacturing there, per The Journal, citing Hochul’s office.
ASML’s advanced machines use lasers and drops of tin in a highly-complex process that uses silicon and ultraviolet light to turn semiconductor materials into chips, according to the company’s website — all while keeping the chip “about 10,000 cleaner than the outside air.”
New York state is joining semiconductor leaders including IBM, Micron Technology, Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron in their investment in a $10 billion chip research facility at the University of Albany. Gregory P. MangoThe 50,000-square-foot manufacturing destination will feature multimillion-dollar chip-making equipment courtesy of ASML Holding. REUTERS
Acquiring machines capable of this advanced technology at this Albany complex expansion is part of the $53 billion Chips Act, which the Commerce Department initiated earlier this year to counter technological advances in China while boosting national security by slashing America’s reliance on imported chips.
New York state has committed $1 billion to the project, which will be used to purchase the ASML equipment and construct the building, The Journal reported.
The facility could also help New York’s bid to be the designated research hub under the Chips Act — which included $11 billion for a National Semiconductor Technology Center designed to advance domestic chip research and development, according to The Journal.
The University of Albany’s new building is set to have a larger impact on the economy.
Hochul’s office predicts its opening will create some 700 new jobs and bring in at least $9 billion in private money.
The Post has sought comment from Hochul’s office, as well as the University of Albany.
The Albany NanoTech Complex — which was first constructed in the late ’90s as a lone 70,000-square-foot facility and has since ballooned into a 1.65 million square-foot complex — has already made headway on its chip research efforts.
The University of Albany is set to welcome the chip-making facility in two years. It will be a part of its Albany NanoTech Complex. The first building in the complex opened in the 1990s.
New York boasts a number of large chip factories, including ones operated by semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries, which works with San Diego, Calif.-based Qualcomm, the maker of chips that come in Android, Asus and Sony devices.
Fellow semiconductor manufacturing company Onsemi also boasts a manufacturing facility in Rochester, NY, and Wolfspeed, a semiconductor manufacturer that focuses on silicon carbide, expanded to the East Coast with the opening of its Marcy, NY, facility last year.
State Police investigators are probing whether troopers in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s security detail have been cheating taxpayers by claiming they’re on the clock when they’re actually blowing off their shifts, The Post has learned.
The probe is focused on members of the governor’s detail stationed in New York City — and those troopers under scrutiny have already been removed from their post and could face disciplinary action if the allegations are confirmed, state police officials told The Post on Monday.
The governor’s detail includes a rotating group of more than 40 troopers and supervisors, law-enforcement sources said.
The New York State Troopers’ Internal Affairs Bureau is probing claims that at least some of them had their records falsified so that they could still get paid even when they weren’t working, sources said.
Some of the troopers are specifically accused of having colleagues sign them in on timesheets and then simply not showing up for their shifts, sources said.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s state-police security detail is under investigation because some members may have falsified records to get paid while blowing off their shifts. The Washington Post via Getty Images
IAB investigators grilled several troopers in Hochul’s detail last week about the allegations, with more officers expected to be questioned later this week, according to sources.
The probers also are reviewing everyone’s timesheet, sources said.
In a statement Monday, state police spokesman William Duffy confirmed that the agency “has launched an administrative investigation into time and attendance issues involving members of the Protective Services Unit.
The governor’s security detail is the focus of an internal state-police probe.Larry Marano
“Integrity is one of our core values and we thoroughly investigate any claims of wrongdoing,” Duffy said. “If our investigation determines that our policies were violated, the state police will take appropriate disciplinary action.”
Hochul, who was elected last year after taking office in 2021 to replace disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, is assigned three different security details to protect her: in Albany, New York City and when she is at her home in Buffalo.
The sources said each of the Albany and New York City details consists of four troopers and one supervisor when they’re on duty, with the details drawn from the larger group.
Gov. Hochul has more than 40 state troopers in her revolving security detail for when she is in New York City, Albany and Buffalo.Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Members of the same rotating group guard Hochul when she’s at home in Buffalo, although it is unclear how many personnel that involves.
The state police said it does not confirm details of security deployments or how many troopers are assigned to each location for safety reasons.
The allegations of time-clock cheating surfaced earlier this month, the sources said.
Officials in the governor’s office did not respond to requests from The Post seeking comment on the probe Monday.
It’s the speech Albany refused to listen to — or heed.
David Soares is the Albany County district attorney, an African American and a Democrat. Yet he’s also a fierce critic of the criminal justice “reforms” passed by the Legislature, saying they have made the state less safe and victimized black residents. He was slated to address a state Senate hearing on crime, but was disinvited because legislators did not like the optics of being criticized by someone they couldn’t dismiss as a “white supremacist” or Republican.
The remarks eventually were read into the record, by someone else, and they were quickly ignored. So here, in Soares’ own words, is what has gone wrong in New York — and what needs to be done. Will Albany continue to dismiss the problem?
Thank you for having me here to testify about public safety in New York state.
I’m going to open by saying something you’ve all heard before; the reforms passed in 2017 and 2019, although they were well intentioned and brought about important changes, have been extremely detrimental to public safety.
What you may not have heard before is a hard truth: that these reforms have had their most devastating impact on black and brown communities. If you take an honest look at the data — the increases in crime, the victims of those crimes and the location of the most violent crimes — the connection is quite clear.
Set the record straight
I’ll set the stage by taking a look at our practices before the reforms. For statistical purposes I will highlight a large metropolitan county and a mid-sized upstate county.
A NYPD officer investigating a shooting in Manhattan on February 18, 2023.Christopher Sadowski
One area that commanded much attention pre-reforms was the percentage of people who were being held on bail post-arrest but pre-conviction. Let’s set the record straight: that was always low, even prior to bail reform. In Albany County, 40% of the beds at the correction facility were occupied by sentenced defendants and defendants awaiting trial on violent felonies.
One 2019 study of the jail population in Queens County found that 95% of the defendants being held pretrial were being held on felonies, 41% on violent felonies.
The perception that many people were being held on minor charges on low bail amounts was always absolutely false. In fact, the same Queens study showed that defendants being held solely because of their inability to post bail on misdemeanor charges had an average of more than five felony arrests, seven misdemeanor arrests, seven misdemeanor convictions and almost three failures to appear.
At some point, repeated violations of the law and disrespect for the process has to be treated with the level of seriousness it deserves.
When bail reform took effect just over three years ago, thousands of defendants were released from local jails. In fact, some judges actually started a “soft launch,” if you will, by releasing some defendants in November of 2019 in anticipation of the new laws, apparently to avoid the mass release of thousands of incarcerated individuals on one day — and perhaps the bad press that would garner.
Lockup under lockdown
Among those individuals suddenly released were hundreds of accused drug dealers, car thieves, shoplifters, burglars, and robbers statewide.
Members of law enforcement have often been told that the suspension of services during the overlapping coronavirus pandemic was the driving force behind the increases in crime in 2020. While that was undoubtedly a contributing factor, that is not a holistic explanation for the decline of public safety.
We actually do have a short window of time to analyze that was post-reforms but pre-COVID. That would be the first 2 ¹/₂ months of 2020. Crime had already started rising — by a lot — by the time the coronavirus hit.
Soares called the criminal justice reforms passed by the state Legislature “extremely detrimental to public safety.”Hans Pennink
In New York City alone, crime rose 20%, ending a 27-year stretch of yearly crime reductions. Crime was up across the board. Burglaries up 26.5%; robbery up 33.9%; grand larceny up 15.8%; car theft up 68%; petit larceny up 19%.
What a coincidence that each of these crimes became a non-bailable offense in 2020, meaning that all those previously held on bail on these charges were released by Jan. 1, 2020. If you deny that the release of hundreds of car thieves, burglars, drug dealers and petty thieves had an obvious impact on crime in New York, you’re denying common sense.
You don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.
Additionally, the new law created a new form of release: “non-monetary release.” This allows judges to release a defendant without bail but enables them to impose certain conditions, such as requiring the defendant to report to a pretrial agency, seek employment or wear an ankle bracelet. These conditions could only be imposed if the court found that the defendant was a flight risk.
This release condition was designed to replace bail, while placing some restrictions on the defendant intended to be more impactful than release on recognizance. These were imposed, essentially, on the defendants who would have had bail set under the old law. If they had a prior conviction or pending case, it would be even more likely a judge would have set bail under the old law.
Blood splattered on the sidewalk after a shooting in Manhattan on February 12, 2023.Matthew McDermott
If we use the Unified Court System’s pretrial data dashboard, and look at the defendants put into the non-monetary release program, we see the following:
Between Jan. 1, 2020 and June 30, 22, 39.6% of the defendants put into NMR got re-arrested while their case was pending.
For those defendants put into NMR who had a prior conviction or pending case (79% of the total), the re-arrest rate was 44.6%.
For those defendants put into NMR charged with commercial burglary, the re-arrest rate was 62%. For residential burglary, it was 47%. For grand larceny, it was 56%. For robbery third degree, it was 56%. For petit larceny, it was 67%.
Doomed to repeat
However, even these numbers undercount the full scope of recidivism. They do not count re-arrests during the time between plea and sentence, which can run for weeks or months. They only count one re-arrest, so if a defendant gets re-arrested four times while out on bail, it only counts in Department of Criminal Justice Services stats as one arrest. The implicit assumption in all of this, that a career criminal is arrested every time they commit a crime, is naïve to say the least.
In the mind of someone who is determined to break the law, the ability to repeat offenses over a short period of time with minimal repercussions serves only to incentivize such behavior.
Speaking of incentivizing behavior with the removal of consequences, the impact of Raise the Age has been comparably detrimental to public safety. Since the implementation of Raise the Age, Albany County has seen approximately 312 Raise the Age cases, involving only 230 defendants. I only say “approximately” because these numbers can change on a day-to-day basis.
Thirty-four percent of those defendants have been arrested more than once; 19% percent of those re-arrested were detained as minors. Of those re-arrested, 62% were re-arrested for a violent felony.
But what do those numbers mean? Those numbers mean that transferring a case to family court often leads to the defendant being returned to the very community that led them down that path to begin with. Violent cases need to remain in the adolescent part to prevent further community harm.
Flat-out wrong
Back to the bail reform law, we should also look at the literal wording of the law, specifically, the words “least restrictive.” These two words from the Bail Elimination Act are specifically referenced by judges when making a determination on bail. That standard often leads to a demonstrably dangerous person being returned to the same environment and community in which they committed their crimes. This helps neither the community nor the offender.
I’d like to conclude by saying, despite the wild misconceptions, generalizations and assertions of activists about the intentions of prosecutors, our aim isn’t to lock up as many people as possible, for as long as possible.
The decade-and-a-half period between the Rockefeller Reforms and Pre Bail Reform in 2020 reflect the greatest gains in public safety in the history of New York state. Prosecutors engaging in intelligence-based investigations and prosecutions applied a tough-on-crime and smart-on-diversion approach that ushered in the age of prison closings throughout New York state.
We understand the complicated nature of social determinants of crime and agree that those should also be prioritized.
However, pretending that accountability and the immobilization of criminals isn’t a critical part of public safety is akin to pretending the Earth is flat.
Just because your echo chamber repeats it, doesn’t make it true.
In her first State of the State Address since winning election in her own right as New York’s chief executive, Gov. Kathy Hochul vowed to work with the Legislature — even as lawmakers are working to derail her nominee for chief judge. In short, she’s yet to show even a hint of fight.
She showed she’d heard voters’ concerns about crime, saying, “Public safety is my top priority.” But her only concrete proposals for fixing bail reform are more minor fiddles, not anything dramatic like allowing judges to consider “dangerousness” as they do in every other state.
Worse, in a naked bid to appease progressives, she insisted that bail reform is not the primary driver of crime before saying she wants to “have a thoughtful conversation during the budget process about improvements we can make to the law.”
That’s a hint that she might hold lawmakers’ spending desires hostage to getting real changes, but then she detailed minor ones to give judges a little more discretion to remand defendants accused of serious crimes.
Yes, “dangerousness” is a red flag for the Legislature’s progressives; that’s one reason why Mayor Eric Adams has recently focused on asking lawmakers to simply get tougher on the handful of repeat offenders driving crime. But Hochul didn’t raise the issue.
No: On crime, the best news she offered was a tripling of aid to the state’s 62 district attorney offices to help them handle the huge added costs (under the “discovery” changes enacted along with the no-bail law) of prosecuting every defendant, even those destined for a plea bargain.
She’s also looking in the right direction with her $1 billion plan targeting the most serious mental illness, including restoring lost inpatient psychiatric beds and even adding 1,000 beds statewide (though only 150 for the five boroughs) as well as 3,400 units of supportive housing to foster outpatient care.
Another plus: With a recession in the offing, she vowed no hike in income taxes this year. That’ll mean a fight, as legislators are talking about finding $40 billion in new tax revenue. But it shows she understands the “why” behind the population loss she wants to reverse.
Or does she? Hochul then squashed hopes for an improved business climate by proposing to peg New York’s $15 minimum wage to inflation. That remark brought Democrats to their feet. And her anti-carbon “climate” policies will never build business confidence no matter how much she pretends they will magically lower energy bills.
Plus, she didn’t make any promises about ensuring the “temporary” income-tax hikes passed in 2021 (under the last guy) will actually expire, when temporary hikes have a long habit of becoming permanent in this state.
Hochul claimed that “public safety is my top priority” and gave proposals to fix bail reform laws.AP Photo/Hans Pennink
Oh, and as Citizens’ Budget Commission chief Andrew Rein noted, “The State of the State presented an expansive menu [of new spending]. We now await the Executive Budget to see the bill.” Where will she find the revenue?
Her goal of getting 800,000 new homes built over the next decade seems fine, but her address failed to mention one key means to that: replacing the city’s 421-a tax credit to make it affordable for builders to construct anything besides luxury complexes.
Yes, that made it into her longer policy handout, but that hardly suggests she’ll go to the mat for it.
Even though her audience theoretically included the whole state, Hochul seemed exclusively determined not to offend the lawmakers hearing her in-person. Yet she’s going to have to if she’s to get even what she’s asking for outright.
That is, she’ll need to at the very least rally moderate Democratic state senators to back her: They actually outnumber the chamber’s progressives, yet the hard left is calling the shots so far in the LaSalle nomination, and plainly intends to keep doing so.
Democrats lost seats in the Legislature last fall, but the left pretends that’s all Hochul’s fault for not somehow doing better against Republican challenger Lee Zeldin — though all he did was hit hard on the issues of crime and the economy. Progressives refuse to see what changes the voters want.
Hochul opted to skirt that reality once again in her closing: “Eleanor Roosevelt once said, ‘You . . . who are going to build a new world must go forward with courage.’ We will build a new world. And we will be courageous.”
All that did was leave everyone wondering when New York’s governor will show that courage.
The Issue: Ronald S. Lauder’s piece on the normalization of anti-Semitism on college campuses.
The Ivy League should be renamed the “Poison Ivy League” (“Ivy Fear & Loathing,” Ronald Lauder, PostOpinion, Jan. 2).
Few can any longer question that the ever-increasing hatred of Jews on college campuses is being directed at all Jews, irrespective of outward appearance or degree of religious observance. Just being a Jew is all it takes.
The lack of public outrage and the complete ineptitude displayed by both political and university leaders to stem this flood of hatred should serve as a reminder that we have only ourselves to rely upon.
When Nazi Germany made good on its threats to destroy the Jewish people, the world remained silent. Campus leaders have chosen to remain mum as Jew-hatred flows unchecked within the confines of their hallowed institutions.
S.P. Hersh
Lawrence
Lauder’s condemnation of anti-Semitism, which has become a widespread hatred in our universities, is an Émile Zola-like accusation.
Sadly, we need more than accusation. We need to identify and stamp out the root causes, one of which is the hiring and promotion of left-wing teachers who offer woke ideas that condemn merit and any traditional view of history as evil. Our universities are sorely damaged.
Leonard Toboroff
Manhattan
Does the ugly rise of Jew-hatred on campus reflect the alarming change in our society from one that allows freedom of speech to one ruled by woke values? Or are these incidents the result of ignorance of the Holocaust?
Condemning Jews has become acceptable, but do not criticize Palestinian student organizations. Otherwise, you are Islamophobic.
We erase history in our woke society by tearing down statues and indoctrinating students with activist values. Thought control reigns. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
A.J. Linn
Manhattan
As a Jew, I am so sick and tired of reading about and occasionally dealing with the rise of anti-Semitism. If black, gay or Asian people (or any number of other groups) were treated the same, it would be a bigger news story.
I have a solution. It is time for all Jewish charitable organizations to divest themselves from institutions that fail to protect Jews. Let them find other financial suckers.
The generation raised by Holocaust and Russian pogrom survivors knows how to fight back. Please don’t unleash that side of us.
Lee Fleischman
Stamford, Conn.
The Issue: A plan passed by a state panel requiring a 40% cut in emissions over 1990 levels by 2030.
The same crew of detached, clueless partisan ideologues masquerading as legislators who gave us the deadly no-bail law now wants to force an equally delusional set of “climate” policies down New Yorkers’ throats (“NY’s Green-Agenda Pain,” Editorial, Jan. 1).
As disastrous as bail reform has been, this reckless attempt at “climate reform” has the potential to be far worse. More of our neighbors, now fearing power outages, will join the hundreds of thousands who have already bolted the state.
Jim Soviero
E. Setauket
If allowed to move forward, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act will be an economic declaration of war on New Yorkers by their government.
The act will stifle business, impoverish New Yorkers and litter the pristine upstate landscape with wind turbines and solar farms. New Yorkers will become economic victims under the thumb of an ever-increasing behemoth of government.
William Millward
Hobart
Want to weigh in on today’s stories? Send your thoughts (along with your full name and city of residence) to letters@nypost.com. Letters are subject to editing for clarity, length, accuracy and style.
There are a lot of New Yorkers whose parents and grandparents never voted for a Republican, who have themselves never voted for a Republican, and who have long planned to go to their graves never having voted for a Republican. Listen, I get it — I was like that, too, not long ago. But hear me out and consider what the stakes are, here and now, in our once-grand city and state.
New York is no longer controlled by the Democrats of yesteryear. Hugh Carey, Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch, and even David Dinkins would be aghast at what’s happening right now in the name of their party. They were sensible, pragmatic leaders who were willing squarely to face decline, decay, and despair, call it out for what it was, and demand that we fight against the forces of entropy to build a New York worthy of being called the Empire State, and New York City the Greatest City in the World.
Kathy Hochul, flanked by other career Democrats Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, will not challenge the left-wing stranglehold in Albany. ZUMAPRESS.comEfforts by New York State Democrats to “out-progressive” one another have resulted in sky-rocketing crime, particularly in New York City.Christopher Sadowski
No more. Look at who’s in charge in Albany. Kathy Hochul was a washed-up upstate nobody when Andrew Cuomo plucked her from obscurity because he needed a woman on his ticket—preferably one who would never upstage him. Little did anyone guess he would stumble into scandal and we’d wind up with a tool of the Erie County machine running the state.
New York is now run as a one-party state, and the problem when one party is in charge is that the usual moderating effects of the primary-and-general election system break down. Typically, candidates can run to the extremes in the primary, but can’t go too far out there because they have to come back towards the center in November. But when the general election is an afterthought, then party extremists tend to dominate the primaries.
Video outtakes from a random, unprovoked subway pushing earlier this month in Brooklyn.DCPI
That’s what’s happened in New York. There’s no longer such a thing as being too far to the left, and longtime liberal elected officials tremble in fear that they will be “primaried” by a progressive. Then, a few years later, the progressives get called hacks and sellouts, and are taken out by Democratic Socialists who promise to defund the police, abolish jails and prisons, and seize private property for which they can imagine better uses.
This game of ideological leapfrog will lead us straight off a cliff.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is one of many soft-on-crime politicians who could lose their jobs if Zeldin becomes governor.Gabriella Bass
Kathy Hochul is no ideologue, but she doesn’t have the backbone to stand up against the crazies in her party. The criminal justice “reforms” of 2019 have created a public safety disaster in New York City, where violent crime and street disorder are off the charts. The people in power know this, which is why they are lying about it so persistently, demanding that we stop looking with our eyes, and substitute their fudged, partial data for our own common sense.
Governor Hochul could have done something about bail reform last spring, but she didn’t want to anger the left wing of her party. She could have done something about discovery reform, which has hamstrung district attorneys around the state, but she preferred to sneak through a massive stadium giveaway to the folks back home.
Zeldin rides the subway to his debate with Hochul, who has said she will pick up the cost of some NYPD overtime shifts to help protect New Yorkers underground.James Keivom
It was only after the latest polls showed that Lee Zeldin was gaining on her that Hochul ventured down into the subway system (standing outside the turnstile, I should add) andpromised to pick up the cost of some overtime shifts so the NYPD can — fingers crossed! — dissuade tomorrow’s maniac from throwing a stranger onto the tracks.
New York is spiraling. There is a huge fiscal crunch looming, the state is losing taxpayers, and the current leadership refuses to admit that we have a problem. Electing Kathy Hochul is only going to confirm her deluded sense of fitness for the job and solidify the current downward direction of the state’s affairs.
Zeldin and Hochul take to the debate floor earlier this week. Extending Hochul’s unelected tenure would likely cause even more New Yorkers to flee the state — taking their tax dollars with them. AP
Lee Zeldin may not be your idea of a fun night on the town, but there is no question that he will apply the brakes on this slow-motion train wreck. He will provide counterweight to the extremists in the legislature. He will fire Alvin Bragg and any other DA who refuses to do their job. He is not going to do anything — he can’t do anything — about abortion in New York, whatever Hochul says, and everyone knows it. The right to choose is enshrined in our laws. Meanwhile, making an issue of Zeldin’s support for Trump is, frankly, sour grapes and a distraction on Hochul’s part. Anyone who hates Trump enough to let Hochul destroy New York over it has bigger problems — it’s like burning down your house because you ran out of milk.
The wheels have come off this clown car, and the clowns seem happy to let the car careen down the hill. We can’t go on this way much longer. New York Democrats, this is no time for ballot purity. This state of emergency demands that you look beyond party identification and vote against the candidate who is running us into oblivion.
Gov. Kathy Hochul treated herself to nearly $1 billion worth of pork-barrel spending in this year’s state budget — allowing her to freely hand out cash as she runs for election against Republican challenger Lee Zeldin.
Hochul and her Democratic allies in the Legislature added the $920 million worth of outlays to the $220.5 billion fiscal plan in an 11th-hour move in April that government watchdogs warn is wide open to abuse.
“These slush funds are totally unaccountable. It’s not how public dollars should be doled out,” senior policy adviser Rachael Fauss of Reinvent Albany said Friday.
Another nonpartisan nonprofit, the Citizens Budget Commission, said the cash “will go to projects and purposes that primarily will be identified behind closed doors.”
“As such, they are ripe for political allocation rather than a distribution based on sound, holistic capital planning that addresses critical infrastructure needs,” the CBC wrote in a July analysis.
Kathy Hochul gave herself around $1 billion in a slush fund.
The group also noted that the $535 million poured into two of three “lump sum” spending programs — the Long Island Investment Fund and the Local Community Assistance Program — can be spent “for essentially any purpose” and “isn’t subject to any agreement with the Legislature.”
In recent weeks, Hochul announced two expenditures that squarely targeted the Long Island home base of Zeldin, an outgoing, four-term US representative.
One provided $50 million in funding for a competition to “attract and grow companies in the life sciences, health technology and medical device sectors” on Long Island.
The other awarded a $10 million grant to the Northwell Health network’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research for 26 new, state-of-the-art laboratories in Manhasset.
Hochul touted both initiatives on the state’s official website, which also says that “the Long Island Investment Fund will focus on large-scale projects that will support and grow the regional economy, enhance communities, and have lasting impacts across the Long Island region.”
And on Sept. 27, Hochul was joined at a news conference about the Feinstein Institutes funding by state Sen. Anna Kaplan (D-Carle Place), who faces Republican Jack Martins, a former state senator, in a race that’s expected to be close due to local outrage over New York’s controversial bail-reform law.
“Kathy Hochul hasn’t simply blurred the line between governing and campaigning — she’s completely erased it,” remarked state Senate Minority Leader Will Barclay (R-Fulton).
“New York has the least transparent budget process imaginable and what we’re seeing now is a product of creating pools of money with no guidelines whatsoever.”
In addition to the “lump sum” funding, the CBC identified six “individual purpose” pork projects, including the controversial $600 million earmarked for a new stadium for Hochul’s hometown football team, the Buffalo Bills.
In Hochul’s budget, $350 million was added as a “Long Island fund.”
The governor’s husband, former Buffalo US Attorney Bill Hochul, is a top executive at the Delaware North hospitality and food service company that manages the scores of concession and retail outlets at the Bills’ Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park.
Another project with a direct tie to Hochul is the planned $20 million reconstruction of the Carrier Dome sports stadium at Syracuse University, her alma mater.
The planned Universal Hip-Hop Museum in the South Bronx and the planned Mohawk Harbor Events Center in Schenectady were awarded $11 million and $10 million in funding, respectively.
The New York Hall of Science in Corona, Queens, and Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts in Lower Manhattan will also get $10 million and $5 million, respectively, for upgrades.
In its analysis, the CBC said as much as $1.2 billion of the spending could be financed by bonds that would “consume” the state’s ability to issue debt and potentially prevent it from financing other, “critical” projects in the future.
Several critics compared Hochul’s budgetary maneuvers to those of her widely reviled predecessor, ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned amid a sexual harassment scandal last year.
“This is Cuomo crony capitalism 2.0,” said city Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island), spokesman for the pro-Zeldin Save Our State political action committee.
“It’s the same old from the same old Albany crowd. And there’s nothing to address the real issues New Yorkers are concerned about.”
Said GOP political consultant William O’Reilly: “This is a classic Andrew Cuomo tactic — a pre-election Santa Claus giveaway to key voting constituencies. It costs Gov. Hochul nothing, but it costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, all to benefit her reelection drive.”
“You can’t get much swampier than this,” O’reilly emphasized.
In an emailed response, Hochul spokesperson Avi Small said, “Gov. Hochul worked with the legislature to craft a fiscally responsible budget, using an influx of federal pandemic relief to make strategic investments in public safety, infrastructure, and tax relief while also making unprecedented deposits in rainy day reserves to protect against future uncertainty – even leading to Moody’s upgrading the state’s credit rating after the budget was passed.”
A spokesman for the Budget Division said the state had $6 billion in cash available to pay for capital projects, but didn’t immediately respond when asked whether that would cover all of the $1.6 billion in spending cited by the CBC.
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This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
