A key energy affordability program is getting a lift. New York is planning to steer tens of millions of dollars from a regional pollution pricing program to Empower+, reversing steep cuts to the program that New York Focus first reported over the summer.

The threatened cuts provoked an outcry from advocates and lawmakers at a time when Governor Kathy Hochul has made energy affordability a priority. The Empower+ program allows low- and moderate-income households to permanently reduce their bills by paying for energy efficiency upgrades, including home insulation and new appliances.

For the first time since she took office in 2021, Governor Kathy Hochul won’t be taking a stack of unsigned bills with her into the Christmas holiday. This year, she has already either signed or vetoed all but two of the 856 bills that passed the state legislature. (One of them is the controversial Medical Aid in Dying Act, which she’s promised to sign; the other would add two judicial districts in western New York, and is still up in the air.)

She’s moved quickly in part by vetoing more bills than usual: 140, or more than 16 percent of those the Senate and Assembly passed. Last year, she vetoed fewer and negotiated over more. The only year Hochul issued more vetoes was 2022, when lawmakers passed a whopping 1,010 bills — the highest number in at least three decades — and the governor axed 166 of them.

This year’s vetoes range from predictable (like the Grieving Families Act, nixed for the fourth time in a row) to confounding, like a bill to protect a corporate transparency law Hochul championed in 2023. As Chris Bragg writes below, the law is now poised to be crippled by new federal rules, just when it was set to take effect.

Terrell Eleby, a Brooklyn native incarcerated in New York’s Shawangunk Correctional Facility, wrote to a conviction review unit in Kings County in 2013, asking it to reinvestigate his murder and assault convictions. He claimed in part that police had threatened witnesses to keep them from testifying in his favor.

A decade would pass before he learned the unit rejected his application.

Chad Richards, currently behind bars at the same facility for possessing and selling cocaine, sought a conviction review from a similar unit in Ulster County in 2019. It promised to follow up with him in the “near future.”

Richards has yet to hear back.