Dear New York Focus readers,

If you’ve kept up with us this week, you might have noticed that this is the busiest time of the year for state government reporting with negotiations beginning over the state budget. Our team of reporters dug into the differing state proposals, and I asked a few of them about their process.

When the proposals were released, reporters dropped the documents into our group messaging channels and began updating a shared spreadsheet that editors have built and refined over the years. From there, it was all hands on deck unpacking the proposals, with each reporter examining them relative to their beat — including social services, education, criminal justice and climate.

“One of these documents might have hundreds of pages,” Focus reporter Julia Rock said. “Often, the things that are really consequential or transformative are the things at the margins.”

Julia has been covering child care and the impending funding shortfall that could result in thousands of New Yorkers losing access to child care benefits. When she started sifting through the budget documents, she had one question in mind — how will the state support parents who can’t afford child care?

Over the last week, she’s been on the phone calling and texting sources at think tanks, advocacy groups and the legislature trying to unpack the proposals. She found that while both houses of the state legislature are proposing hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending on child care, neither of their plans would overcome the threat of the imminent funding shortfall.

Bianca Fortis, New York Focus education reporter, walked me through her process comparing the proposals for CUNY and SUNY scholarships. Just following the back-and-forth between the executive proposal, legislative proposals was enough to make my head spin, but what made her job covering education even more tricky was the fact that the documents would include numbers representing both the fiscal year and the academic year but these were not labeled. She had to check with her sources to get the story straight.

This is Colin Kinniburgh’s third round covering the budget on the climate beat, and he’s gotten the hang of it.

“The budget bills are such a maze, things aren’t labeled in obvious ways, so many lines of appropriations and reappropriations, but once you know where to look it’s not crazy complicated.”

This year, Colin reported on the way New York’s ambitious climate agenda showed up in its budget priorities — or didn’t. At a time when the Trump administration is decimating climate policy at a national level, the state seems to be leaving it to the margins. Most notably, since Governor Kathy Hochul dropped the “cap and invest” climate funding program from her proposals, the Senate and Assembly aren’t making a fight for it in theirs.

The key to reporting on the budget for all our reporters is to have a few reliable sources who can compare notes and make sure we’re reading things right. Do you want to help us in the future? With our new tip line, you can reach out to us securely on Proton Mail or to our reporters on Signal.

Send us a tip: nysfocus@protonmail.com and let me know what you think about the newsletter: alex@nysfocus.com.

-Alex Arriaga, New York Focus audience engagement editor

Sam Mellins has been with New York Focus since Day One and has become an expert on the budget — this is his fifth round. Read his budget overview to get a sense of key proposals, overall spending, tax hikes, an inflation rebate, the state’s reserves and the plan — or lack thereof — on how the state will fill the gap in funding for the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s repair and upgrade plan.

“So far, no lawmakers have put forward any concrete ideas for how to fill that gap, though some vague proposals like taxing ride-shares or deliveries have been floated,” he wrote.

In addition to his budget coverage, Sam broke the story on Friday that about half of the governor’s proposed “middle-class” tax cuts will go toward New Yorkers who by some measures aren’t considered middle class. He wrote:

“According to an analysis shared with New York Focus by the liberal think tank Fiscal Policy Institute, the top 20 percent of earners statewide would receive the largest share of the tax cut’s benefits. More than half of the savings for joint filers would go to households making over $154,000 — nearly twice the state’s median household income. A commonly cited income cutoff for middle-class households, meanwhile, is just under $163,000.”

Chris Bragg, Akash Mehta and Julia teamed up for the scoop that Andrew Cuomo’s state-funded defense lawyers are throwing him a fundraiser for his mayoral campaign.

“New York Focus obtained an invitation to an event scheduled for Thursday afternoon at the Manhattan office of the Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello law firm. Three of the event’s co-hosts — Rita Glavin, Theresa Trzaskoma, and Elkan Abramowitz — defended the former governor against sexual harassment allegations and a federal probe into his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

What’s most startling to me is that Cuomo’s lawyers are *continuing* to represent him, on taxpayer dime, while they fundraise for him. He is steering public money to them while they steer private money to him.

— Akash Mehta (@akashmehta.bsky.social)

Colin also had a story on Monday about the billions that utility companies pour into replacing old gas pipes, even though it could be much cheaper to go electric, according to a new study.

“If you live in Brooklyn, Buffalo, or Long Beach, you might have heard it lately: the clatter of jackhammers as utility workers replace gas lines under the street. The process can drag on for months, as workers dig up roads and sidewalks and drill into homes to swap out aging metal pipes for new, plastic ones.”

As I was reading his story on Monday morning, I was trying to tune out the sound of jackhammers outside my own window. The all-electric route could save customers nearly $5 billion by 2050, the study finds.

Reporter Chris Gelardi anticipates an upcoming battle on criminal justice proposals.

“Both the Senate and the Assembly omitted Governor Kathy Hochul’s central policing and prosecution policy priorities, even as the chambers embraced her proposals to increase oversight of the state’s embattled prison system.”

And neither the Assembly nor Senate included the governor’s proposed changes to pretrial evidence sharing in their budgets. Hochul’s proposals would give prosecutors power to decide what information they initially need to share with defendants and make it harder for judges to dismiss cases when they don’t.

Social services reporter Jie Jenny Zou wrote about the biggest chunk of spending in the budget — healthcare. Nearly 7 million New Yorkers rely on Medicaid for healthcare coverage, and as federal funding cuts are anticipated, both Hochul and the legislature are proposing increased state funding.

“Healthcare advocates have urged the state to expand Medicaid coverage to vulnerable groups such as undocumented immigrants, youth exiting foster care, and people released from jails or prisons.”