When Kathy Hochul took over as governor in 2021, she promised a more transparent, more responsive state government. In her first major speech as chief executive, she vowed to usher in a “new era of transparency,” including by facilitating an “expedited process” to more promptly fulfill public records requests under the state’s Freedom of Information Law.

It was a niche topic for a debut speech, but important for government accountability: FOIL, which allows members of the public to request unpublished records from state and local government agencies, is one the main ways that journalists, advocates, and other watchdogs ensure that New York officials don’t evade public scrutiny. Each state has a version of the law, but New York is among the slowest to fulfill requests.

Four years later, Hochul has pursued some transparency initiatives, — but still hasn’t come through on her promise to expedite New York’s notoriously slow FOIL system. This year, the state legislature tried to pick up the slack, passing a bill that would tighten the deadlines that agencies must meet in responding to FOIL requests — but this month, Hochul vetoed it.

After his mother died in 2022, Selwyn Bernardez spiraled into a grief- and drug-induced psychosis, roaming the New York City subway system with a samurai sword. He struck a panhandler, landing him on Rikers Island for six months he described as “hell on Earth.”

Then something unusual happened. His public defender secured him a spot in the Manhattan Felony Alternative-to-Incarceration Court, a diversion program that allowed him to enter comprehensive treatment and ultimately see his felony assault charge dropped. He spent a year in intensive therapy, attending recovery meetings, and completing regular court check-ins. When he graduated from the program last year, he was working again and had rebuilt family relationships, he testified at a state Senate hearing last week.

Courts around the state have set up similar programs to allow people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders to enter treatment when facing certain criminal charges, typically in exchange for a guilty plea, as an alternative to jail or prison time. But they reach just a fraction of the people who might benefit from them.

A controversial highway expansion in the Hudson Valley has been delayed after pushback from transportation planners and environmentalists, who argued that it isn’t necessary and would harm the local environment.

The long-planned project, which Governor Kathy Hochul has championed, would expand a 30-mile stretch of highway in New York’s Orange and Sullivan counties, about 60 miles northwest of New York City. Last year, New York Focus reported that the project would cost the state at least $1.3 billion and save drivers just one to six minutes.

This past May, Sierra Johnson — a Native American woman who sued the State of New York in 2023 alleging she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by prison staff while held in two different upstate prisons — phoned me from her hospital bed in Burlington, Vermont.

Johnson, 36, had been diagnosed with end-stage heart failure and was recovering from a two-week stay in intensive care after a heart attack. Her voice shook and cracked over the line as she told me her story, saying she wanted to speak up for the roughly 1,600 women who sued the state in 2023 under the Adult Survivors Act, alleging they were sexually assaulted in state prisons.

Johnson, a resident of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, periodically apologized for her anxiety or emotions. When I asked if she wanted to stop or take a break, she refused. “This is something that is empowering me to continue to live,” she said.