We’ve gone back to the future when it comes to New York’s budget – and it’s not a good thing.

Late budgets were a thing of the past for years under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. For some of those years, Cuomo was dealing with a divided legislature that had a Republican state Senate. Gov. Kathy Hochul is still dealing with division in government, but it’s over lawmakers’ shade of blue as the past few years have brought a return to protracted budget stalemates of the state’s past. It’s really about Democrats fighting about policy initiatives while Republicans sit on the sidelines waiting to chime in during the budget vote because the lawmakers who represent vast swaths of New York state aren’t entitled to be part of the backroom discussions between Hochul and leadership positions held by legislative Democrats.

Keeping the budget open until early or mid April isn’t ideal, but it’s something that can be dealt with if the state makes policy changes that actually help people – like the rollback of criminal justice reform that came out of the 2025 budget standoff.

The biggest of this year’s disputes is changes to the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act – otherwise known as the bane of any utility ratepayer’s existence now despite Democrats’ claims that utility rate spikes are all due to President Donald Trump. In reality, Trump-related spikes are the cherry on top of the mess that Democrats have made of climate policy in New York over the past several years, starting with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and continuing through ham-handed efforts to electrify the state’s power grid without a backup plan to keep the lights on if things didn’t go exactly as planned. It’s bad enough that Republicans and Democrats are like two ships passing in the night on energy policy. It’s positively tragic for everyone struggling under the weight of higher electric and gas bills when the two ships passing in the night are Democrats who can’t get on the same page.

Our fear is this protracted fight isn’t going to do much to help New Yorkers. Climate law changes, according to Albany sources, are more about giving the state additional time to propose regulations that were supposed to be released in 2024 and prompted a lawsuit by environmental advocates that the state lost to push the state to meet its own CLCPA deadlines. Hochul was looking to push that deadline back to 2030 but has now settled on 2028 in a compromise with legislators. Hochul also wants to change the way the state calculates emissions to match other states, keep a cap and invest enforcement and funding mechanism and implement a 2040 interim target date to achieve a 60% cut in emissions. A 2050 hard deadline to have a zero-emissions power grid would remain intact.

We’re talking about tweaking the CLCPA around its margins to make a lawsuit moot and decrease the already exorbitant costs of the state’s power plan.

What we’re not hearing is anything about short-term electric reliability or easing state mandates that are helping drive power costs through the roof. We’re not talking about increasing the supply of natural gas to help reduce prices. We’re not talking about reducing zero energy credits and renewable energy credits that could help lower power bills quickly.

Taking those actions would be news if they did happen.