Spending is up in the separate budget plans passed by the State Assembly and Senate on Monday.
WXXI news reports both houses, led by Democrats, propose spending more than $6 billion above Governor Kathy Hochul’s spending plan.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said his house is adding an additional $3 billion to help fix a broken child care system and revive the economy. He said it includes money to pay workers higher wages and subsidize costs for lower-income parents.
The Senate is proposing over $4 billion in additional funds for child care, saying the goal is to provide “universal” access.
Senate Finance Committee Chair Liz Krueger said both houses also want to reduce chronic shortages of home health care workers by boosting what are often poverty-level wages.
Hochul’s $216 billion budget plan already increased state spending by more than 5% from the previous year. She was able to do so because of generous federal relief packages earlier in the pandemic, and higher-than-expected tax collections, including a new income tax surcharge on the wealthy.
Fiscal watchdog groups warned that the final budget should not spend more than the governor has proposed.
The Citizens Budget Commission said with the additional funds, Hochul and the Legislature have been given a rare opportunity to finally end New York’s chronic year-to-year budget deficits.
Both houses say their plans are balanced for the next two years, but could not say whether their spending plans would create deficits after that.
The Legislature’s budget plans leave out many items that the governor said were important to her, including authorizing alcohol-to-go for the state’s restaurants, a revamping of the troubled state ethics commission and term limits for statewide elected offices.
The budget is due by April 1.
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