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This was a fun year. I got ejected from a Governor Kathy Hochul event, used the Freedom of Information Law to learn what hackers stole from the state government, and found that the view of the Hudson along the Penn Station to Albany Amtrak line still hasn’t gotten old.
I covered topics ranging from how the state is failing to address its housing crisis to accounting trickery that could net the state government $4 billion from Washington DC.
Thinking over my favorite reporting from this year, three themes emerged that seem key to understanding New York in 2024. Here they are:
Making the Sausage: How Your Politicians Strike Deals in Secret
As we at New York Focus never tire of saying, Albany is infamous for its secrecy and the roadblocks it puts in the way of nosy reporters. This year, I was proud of coverage that illuminated two previously hidden aspects of governing New York.
One, which I covered with Chris Bragg and Akash Mehta, was the state Senate Working Rules Group. Each year, in the final days of the legislative session, a select group of state senators chosen by Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins meets to decide the fate of hundreds of outstanding bills. Everything about the group is secret: its membership, its meetings, its decisions, the bills it considers, and its existence itself. Before our coverage, it had never been the subject of a news article. Not everyone was happy about us shining a light on it — the Senate spokesperson cursed out my colleague — but that’s often the sign of a good story.
The other entry in this category chronicled how a wealthy neighborhood in Westchester used an arcane legislative trick to get itself excluded from a statewide law. In 2023, lawmakers passed a measure making it harder for parts of towns to break away and form new villages. That’s something that Edgemont, a ritzy neighborhood in the town of Greenburgh, wants to do. So they pressured their legislators and the governor and got a unique, 16-year exemption from the law that applies nowhere else in New York state. This was the story of how.
Hochul ❤️ Highways
It’s been a big year for transportation policy in the Hochul administration, and not only because of the governor’s decision to plunge the MTA’s finances into chaos with her six-month pause of Manhattan’s congestion pricing program.
In February, I wrote a story that brought to light her administration’s love affair with highways and how it threatens to undercut President Joe Biden’s climate legacy. Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law sent New York billions of dollars that by default goes mostly to roads, but can be significantly shifted to mass transit at the governor’s request.
Hochul has largely ignored that option. The story found that the overwhelming majority of the spending from this pot has gone to highways, locking New York into a cycle of car dependence and greenhouse gas emissions. If governors around the country do the same, Biden’s infrastructure law could actually accelerate climate change, rather than help combat it, as he intended.
Another story examined what this means in practice. In September, the state Department of Transportation released a study of a proposed highway expansion in the Catskills that Hochul has highly praised. It found that the project will likely cost $1.3 billion. The expected time savings for drivers: one to six minutes.
The Demise of Machine Politics Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Backroom dealings in the style of Tammany Hall are a thing of the past — or so we’d like to believe. Some of my reporting this year cast light on the areas where machine politics still rule the day. In a multi-part investigation, Chris Bragg and I showed how money and power flow through the Bronx Democratic Party, enriching and granting jobs to party faithful.
It started when our review of campaign finance data revealed that $400,000 sent from the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee to the Bronx Democratic Party had vanished from the party’s public reports. That finding prompted the party to disclose the missing cash and then some, which turned into a series revealing that:
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A PAC run by State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, a Bronxite, has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars from a fund meant to boost swing-district candidates to the overwhelmingly Democratic Bronx.
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Under the leadership of Bronx Democratic Party Chair and state Senator Jamaal Bailey, six-figure sums flowed from the party’s coffers to a consulting firm run by Bailey’s close friend Jason Laidley, who is also his former chief of staff and campaign manager.
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Laidley’s consulting firm has represented nearly every successful candidate for Bronx Civil Court in the past three years, including two who were rated “not approved” by the city bar association. Many candidates sent the firm over 60 percent of their campaign funds.
Our reporting on flows of money and power in the Bronx is continuing into 2025.
What else should I look into in 2025? Let me know: sam@nysfocus.com.