On a crisp evening last spring, nearly 100 people packed into an elementary school auditorium in the Hudson Valley town of Athens. They had shown up to weigh in on the future of the town’s largest taxpayer and recipient of one of the biggest property tax subsidies in New York: a natural gas power plant.

For two decades prior, the Athens Generating Plant had received tax breaks averaging roughly $25 million a year. But that deal was about to expire, and its owners argued that without the abatement, the plant might be forced to close. They were looking to renew.

 Across the state, IDAs enter into payment-in-lieu-of-tax agreements, or PILOTs, with businesses, exempting the corporations from property taxes in exchange for a lower annual payment to the town, county, and school district and the promise of job creation. And these little-known local authorities are quietly shaping the economics of the energy transition, in some cases threatening to undermine the state’s climate goals.

President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is a centerpiece of his first term — and a huge windfall for New York. The state is expected to receive $36 billion from the law to upgrade its transportation system, a once-in-a-generation gift.

Biden hailed the 2021 law as a chance to “transform our transportation system” and “turn the climate crisis into an opportunity.” Much of the money was dedicated to public transit and will fund marquee projects like the Second Avenue Subway expansion. But a giant pot was left to states to decide how to spend — either on maintaining and widening roads, or, with federal sign-off, on climate-friendly infrastructure like subways, trains, and sidewalks.

So far, Governor Kathy Hochul’s administration has overwhelmingly chosen the former.

Tim Rogers wouldn’t lose any sleep if someone told him the Ulster County Industrial Development Agency had ceased to exist.

For a decade, the village of New Paltz mayor has railed against tax breaks the agency doles out to businesses and real estate developers. Rogers penned his eighth letter on the subject in December, when the agency lifted its 27-month moratorium on subsidies for housing projects.

The industrial development agency had a history of handing out subsidies that were unpopular with residents. The moratorium was meant to buy the IDA time to develop a housing policy that better aligned with community needs, which many residents say includes affordable housing. The process was underway — agency board members had started drafting after a year of studying the policies of other IDAs — when the moratorium was suddenly lifted. Soon after, two board members, both of whom were in favor of ending subsidies to market rate housing developers, resigned.

One measure in Governor Kathy Hochul’s budget proposal has united the state’s judicial system, legal community, and some legislators against it: an attempt to take $100 million from a low-income legal services fund — and move it into the state’s general cash pool.

Each year, the Interest on Lawyer Account, or IOLA, fund, provides tens of millions of dollars to fund legal help for New Yorkers who can’t afford it. According to the fund’s director, Hochul’s budget proposal would remove about a third of the cash it has available, imperiling its financial health.

Unlike criminal defendants, civil defendants and plaintiffs aren’t guaranteed the right to an attorney, so the fund covers legal aid in hundreds of thousands of civil cases a year. With the fund now under threat, legal organizations that benefit from its grants warn they may have to cut services.

New York schools are losing out on millions of dollars because of an arcane local funding mechanism for corporate subsidies. Now, the fight against this tool has some powerful new supporters: labor unions. On Wednesday, good government groups, legislators, a local development authority board member, and their latest allies from the statewide teachers union and the AFL-CIO gathered in Albany to urge the state to stop the bleeding.