State council avoids critical analysis of Hochul’s budget proposal

A state council controlled by Gov. Kathy Hochul is choosing not to weigh in – at least for now – on the significance of the executive budget proposal on achieving New York’s statutory goal of reducing child poverty in half by 2032.

An analysis of the governor’s budget produced by the Child Poverty Reduction Advisory Council simply considers whether proposals addressing child poverty will have a direct or indirect impact, the timing of the impact, and whether they represent new or ongoing initiatives. Legislative representatives on the council and groups committed to combatting child poverty have separately found that the spending plan advanced by Hochul is missing policies that would make a substantive difference in New York’s child poverty rates.

A copy of this year’s assessment form the council is available below.

Prior to the adoption of the assessment, Hochul administration members and appointees on the council were pushing to include budget policies not directly linked to child poverty. During the most recent council meeting, council member Kate Breslin, president of the Schuyler Center, pushed back on the significance of the proposals the government officials were touting.

“There’s a lot of proposals where I would put a smiley face next to it,” Breslin said.

During that meeting, council member Pete Nabozny, director of policy for The Children’s Agenda, argued that future budget reports should be more than just a “catch-all” list of policies and focus on proposals core to the council’s work.

This debate was part of last year’s budget analysis by the council, with the legislative representatives advancing their own report that scored the significance of the governor’s proposals.  A similar level of introspection was purposefully avoided by the council this year.

Speaking in February on The Capitol Pressroom, Budget Director Blake Washington highlighted the governor’s proposed $50 million anti-poverty initiative targeting a handful of upstate cities.

“The governor didn’t come into this budget with the ability to solve every every problem in the state of New York,” he said, when pressed on the lack of funding for major anti-poverty initiatives.

CPRAC Report on Executive Budget Proposal_ SFY25 by Capitol Pressroom on Scribd