At long last, the tumultuous election of 2024 comes to an end this week. Of course, the most likely scenario is continued tension over vote counts in the battleground states. Here in Albany, the focus will be on governing.
While the Hochul Administration continues to develop a budget plan for next year, the most immediate task ahead for the governor is deciding what to do with the hundreds of pieces of legislation that have passed both houses, but not yet sent for her approval.
Let’s look first at the numbers. In 2024, the state Senate and state Assembly jointly approved a bit more than 800 identical bills. Of those, as of the morning of November 4th, the governor had approved 443 bills and vetoed 3, leaving 360 bills to go.
New York’s Constitution has specific rules for how bills are to be handled. The Constitution requires that once an identical bill has passed both houses it should be sent to the governor for her approval. The courts have ruled that every bill approved by the Legislature must be sent to the governor by the end of the calendar year.
Here are the most important rules, buckle your seat belt.
Once a bill is sent to the governor for approval, she has ten days – excluding Sundays – to consider the legislation. If she approves it, it becomes law. If she vetoes it, then it does not. However, the Legislature can choose to override the veto if two-thirds of the members of each house act in that calendar year. In that case, the bill becomes law over the objections of the governor.
If the governor does nothing during that ten-day period, the bill automatically becomes law.
If lawmakers send the bill to the governor at the end of the calendar year, the Constitution provides that she has 30 days to consider the legislation. In that circumstance, she can approve, or veto as described earlier, but if she does nothing, then the bill is considered vetoed.
The Legislature technically controls when the bill goes to the governor – with the house that approved the bill first making the call. However, in order to manage the volume of bills that the governor considers at any one time, there has been an informal rule that the governor requests bills when she is ready. The Legislature rarely sends a bill unless the governor requests it, and since the three leaders are all in the same political party, there are few reasons to upset the current practice.
As mentioned earlier, Governor Hochul has requested and acted upon nearly 450 bills and has 360 to go. She will start requesting them and must have received them all by the end of the calendar year.
Some of the bills still to be acted on are generally considered less consequential – except, of course, to those pushing them. For example, there is a bill that allows the state’s economic development agency to give a preference to any tourist promotion agency that is promoting the sport of stickball. No offense to stickball, but there are some bills that potentially would have more of an impact, such as a bill that requires local governments to maintain municipal websites.
And some are hugely consequential. For example, the Climate Change Superfund Act’s fate in New York now turns to whether the governor approves the legislation. Governor Hochul is co-chair of the U.S. Climate Alliance – a bipartisan coalition of governors committed to fighting climate change. Among the commitments of the Alliance is the promise to build resilience to withstand the impacts of climate change. The Climate Superfund bill would further that goal. Unless the governor approves the legislation, the entire costs of climate change – which already total billions of dollars annually – will be borne solely by New York taxpayers. The bill shifts some of those costs to the companies most responsible for our worsening climate without those costs being passed on to the public. An independent economic paper published by the respected Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law supports that view.
And New York’s climate costs are already significant and will mushroom over time. This year alone, with New Yorkers experiencing a record number of extreme weather events, Governor Hochul has pledged approximately $1.4 billion in taxpayer spending to cover climate damages. In addition, New York has already invested $15 billion solely for coastal resiliency projects along New York Harbor.
That proposal is one of the big decisions for the governor. But only one. As New York heads into the last weeks of 2024, the governor and her staff will be rolling up their sleeves to figure out her position on 360 remaining bills. One of them could help save taxpayers big bucks in the coming years as well as build a safer infrastructure to better protect New Yorkers from a worsening climate.
It makes sense for her to approve it. Time will tell.