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SOUTHERN FINGER LAKES

Tom O’Mara: “The warning signs are already flashing”

A weekly COLUMN by NY State Senator Tom O’Mara,

When lawmakers gathered at the State Capitol last week for the opening day of the 2025 legislative session, talk of “affordability” was in the air and ringing through every hallway.

Especially from state leaders.

From Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul, “My top priority is tackling New York’s affordability crisis.”

From Democrat Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, “We have always kept our focus on affordability.”

From Democrat Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, “I think people are going to be pleased to see how much of a concentration we’re going to have on trying to put money back into people’s pockets.”

Put it back? How about not taking money out of people’s pockets in the first place? We can’t continue to rob Peter to pay Paul to offset the unaffordable cost of living in New York State. The Peters are the ones leaving this state, in droves.

New York’s Democrat leaders have either finally seen the light on how unaffordable this state has become under their direction or, more likely, they’re finally, truly feeling the wrath of taxpayers and voters saying, Enough.

We’ll see. The trouble is that for all their talk of finally addressing this state’s affordability crisis, which continues to drive out taxpayers in masses (according to one of the latest studies, New York was the state with the third-highest number of people moving out in 2024), it leaves many New Yorkers simply wondering where the Democrats have been along?

Even more striking, for all the Democrat talk about affordability, in the next breath they get right back to talking about a more favorite pastime: spending more.

Governor Hochul delivers her State of the State address to the Legislature on Tuesday and she’s already been signaling her desires for new spending, including new big-ticket items such as her “Inflation Refund” to hand out a one-time, direct payment of up to $500 to nearly nine million New Yorkers at a cost of at least $3 billion. That’s on top of ongoing Green New Deal initiatives like the Climate Superfund, Cap-and-Invest, all-electric school buses, cars and trucks, and mandatory sprinkler systems in new home construction. And rest assured that announcements of additional big spending will be on the way for migrant services, education, Medicaid, and more. All of which will exacerbate unaffordability in New York.

Talking about big and bold spending of taxpayer dollars is all well and good – and it may include some priorities on which there could be across-the-board agreement – but sooner or later you have to pay for it all. A fresh million here and a new billion there add up quickly. And believe me, we’ve been paying for it all under all-Democrat, one-party control of state government since 2019, paying for it all to the tune of nearly $70 billion in increased spending to afford what has become, year after year after year, the latest highest-ever New York State budget. That’s 40% growth, far outpacing inflation, in just six years of Albany Democrats in complete control.

By the time they get done – and by the time this governor leaves office and it’s not her concern anymore – a new generation of New York State taxpayers will join a previous generation of taxpayers who are being left trying to foot the bill for this out-of-control spending for the rest of their lives in New York – that is, if they stay.

I have called it one of the most bloated and wasteful state budgets in the nation and we may well be in for yet another round of it in the coming year. It has already put New York on a steady course of budget deficits that will require an equally steady dose of steadfastly high taxes, borrowing, unfunded mandates, cost shifting, and other so-called “revenue raising” actions and fiscal gamesmanship.

While I would bet that we won’t hear Governor Hochul go anywhere near the topic in her State of the State on Tuesday, Assembly Speaker Heastie did it for her on the session’s opening day. While far from setting it in stone, Speaker Heastie did put it on the table on day one by at least injecting some candid reality into the jubilant atmosphere of affordability at the Capitol when he said to Spectrum News, ““Usually there are very few ways to raise revenue, fees and taxes…You got to get revenue from somewhere.”

Talk doesn’t matter at the end of the day. Actions do. We’ll see where it all winds up a few months from now when the Democrats finally get around to enacting a new state budget.

But the warning signs are already flashing.