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.

When Pamela Brown found out that her lawyer had been indicted for stealing money from her other clients, she became worried that she, too, had been robbed.

Brown had been required to deposit more than $53,000 in an escrow bank account controlled by the attorney, Daphna Zekaria. Brown asked Zekaria to prove the money was still in the account and return it. The lawyer never responded.

In May, following a criminal investigation by the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office, Zekaria pleaded guilty to robbing nearly $400,000 from three other clients, stealing escrow funds in two instances and performing no legal work despite charging a significant fee in another. Zekaria has been disbarred and will face six years in prison if she doesn’t pay restitution by next May.