April 28, 2025

It appears that state budget negotiations have reached the point where the leaders in the Legislature have been able to identify how much money is available to each of the various Joint Legislative Budget subcommittees to spend on specific executive budget proposals they want to either add money to, or pay for outright (when a proposal is missing entirely).  You will note the slight decrease in available funds overall from last year to this year.

The significance of this is that for big ticket budget items (like a 7.8% Targeted Inflationary Increase for Human Services, or TII) and where the Governor has agreed (in her executive budget proposal) to pay for 2.1% of it, the legislature is left to ‘find the money’ to make up the difference OR (as is often the case) the legislative committees are forced to go to the leaders for the funds they need to get to whatever total amount they want to contribute to the total.
Typically the Mental Hygiene committee is tasked with finding the resources to subsidize the Governor’s contribution for increases for OMH, OASAS and OPWDD, but there’s a long way to go to get to a 7.8% TII.

 2025 – $375M

Economic Dev – 15M
Education – 80M
Agriculture – 15M
General Gov – 20M
Health – 45M
Higher Ed – 30M
Human services – 110M
Mental Hygiene – 10M
Public protection – 45M
Transportation – 5M

2024 – $405M 
Health (non medicaid) – $60 million
Mental Health – $30 million
Higher Ed – $40 million
Economic Development – $20 million
Education – $90 million
Environment/AG/Housing – $20 million
General Gov / Local – $20 million
Human Services / Labor – $120 million
Transportation – $5 million