Albany -- Governor Kathy Hochul vetoing her first seven bills of 2025 this week.
Some of those vetoes included:
-an EV emergency response training program
-a requirement for food delivery like Uber Easts or InstaCart to disclose the difference in their prices, compared to the store
-a requirement for nursing homes to dedicate storage spaces for bodies of deceased people
-shorter time frame requirements for agencies responding to FOIL requests
Good government groups like Reinvent Albany called the FOIL legislation the most promising in years.
It would have established new, stricter time requirements for state and local agencies to respond to FOIL requests.
In her veto memo, the Governor states:
"While I support the goal of enhancing public transparency, the bill as drafted is unworkable. It establishes arbitrary deadlines for state and local governmental entities to disclose records in response to FOIL requests, regardless of complexity or length of any given request or the staff time needed to complete review. Additionally the bill does not allocated additional resources to agencies to ensure they are able to comply. Therefore, I am constrained to veto this bill."
Reinvent Albany responded to that veto memo today.
"Right now, the deadlines that agencies give the public are completely arbitrary," Rachael Fauss, Senior Policy Advisor, said. "They'll say 'we're going to take 30 days to respond,' and then they do extensions over and over and over again, and the public can wait years, and there doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason with how long agencies can take. There does feel like there's arbitrariness, but from our perspective, it's in the way that different agencies apply these rules differently and take different periods of time. So we wanted to reset the clock, start the process over, and make it be standard, so that the public knows what to expect, instead of having a big question mark about how long it'll take them to get records right."
Generally, the Governor citing lack of funding in the budget, or "burdensome barriers", in her veto memos of all of the above.
But, there is a commonality between the seven vetoed pieces of legislation, all were sponsored by NYS Senator James Skoufis, a Democrat representing parts of Orange County.
During this year's legislative session, Sen. Skoufis was extremely vocal in opposition of how the Governor was handling budget negotiations.
"We need to be exerting ourselves as the co-equal branch of government that we are, and that requires standing up to this want to be dictator," Skoufis told CBS6 in May.
At that time, on social media, the Governor's Press Secretary went back and forth with Skoufis, calling it "an embarrassing juvenile stunt, from a camera-hungry clown."
In May, Reinvent Albany buoyed Skoufis' argument, pitching measures like: prohibiting messages of necessity, stronger accounting principles, an independent budget office, hoping there will be more avenues to disclose 'secret spending.'
The Governor's Press Secretary at the time also responding to those proposals, saying 'those Constitutional powers' are one of the reasons the Governor's "Affordability Agenda" moved forward.
"Thanks to Governor Hochul's leadership, more than 8 million New Yorkers will get an inflation refund check starting in October. Because the Governor used her constitutional powers to set the agenda for this budget, New Yorkers are also getting a middle-class tax cut, a massive increase in the Child Tax Credit, universal school meals, common-sense mask restrictions and discovery laws that crack down on recidivism," he said. "We understand it's easy for backbench legislators to get attention by attacking the Governor, but we're not going to waste any time worrying about these stunts."
On Friday, Skoufis told CBS6 he believes the Governor was going to veto those bills anyways, and that the presentation of the vetoes were based on "some grudges that exist in her head".
"Very Trumpian behavior that she'll then turn around the next day and start characterizing Trump, as you know, X, Y and Z, for doing basically the same exact thing that she is purporting to do in this case. And so I think all Democrats and all New Yorkers should be appalled by her rhetoric and her behavior. But, you know, it is what it is. I'll keep doing what I think is right for New Yorkers and and my constituents, even in the face of this silliness," Skoufis said. "The universal feedback that I've gotten and others have gotten since this has all transpired today is: What in the world was she thinking? She looks petty, she looks small, she looks ridiculous, and doesn't look like she knows what she's doing."