Rachel May And Will Barclay On The Campbell Conversations Campbell Conversations podcast

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Rachel May and Will Barclay on the Campbell Conversations

8d ago 27:53

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Program transcript:

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. Governor Kathy Hochul has given her State of the State address and presented her budget for the year. Back with me today on the program to provide reactions to that and also offer a preview of the legislative session are New York State Senator Rachel May and Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay. Senator May represents the state's 48th Senate District and leader Barclay represents the 120 Assembly District. Leader Barclay and Senator May welcome back to the program, it’s good to see you both.

Rachel May: Thank you.

Will Barclay: Thanks for having me on.

GR: Well, thank you, thank you both for making the time. Senator May, I'll start with you. A very basic question, and if you could be brief, I'd appreciate it. But what do you think are the most significant new initiatives that the governor has set forward here in the State of the State and also the budget?

RM: So, I'm pleased that she's leaning into issues about both affordability and child poverty. Obviously, here and in central New York and Syracuse in particular, child poverty is a major issue. So the fact that she wants to expand the child tax credit to continue putting some specific money into Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo for fighting child poverty, universal school lunches, all of those are really important measures, I think, to help lift our kids out of poverty and make life more affordable for parents raising children. Her child care initiatives, I think, are great, but I haven't really seen the money being put behind it. So I feel like that's one where we need to fight for more investment to realize some of those child care savings that she's promising. But I would say on those fronts, it's a pretty exciting budget or at least a budget plan. I would say for agriculture she's done some really good things with dairy farm sustainability, with investing in farm worker housing, a number of the agricultural products that we produce here locally, like maple syrup, she's leaning into as well. So I feel like those are good things. On housing we need to do, I think more than she's proposing, but at least she's proposing some things that I've been calling for, like a revolving fund for housing construction. So, you know, on balance, I think it's a pretty good budget for some of the really key critical issues that we need to be pushing for.

GR: And Leader Barclay, as you took all this in, what was front of mind for you in both what you've set forward in State of the State and the budget?

Will Barclay: Well, in the State of the State, I was, after the State of the State I was pretty complimentary, oddly enough, with the governor because she did what Senator May said. She talked about the issues that seem to be important to New Yorkers and certainly were key issues in this past election. That's affordability and crime. So I was pleased, you know, she talked about it, she talked about a middle class tax cut, which we certainly would support. She talked about the child tax credit, which is a bill that we've had in the assembly that interestingly has been blocked by the assembly majority over the last few years, but hopefully now that the governor's proposed it, maybe they'll look at it in a different view, a different light. So I was happy with that. However, and she also talked about the rebate program, which is a little inefficient, about taking our money and giving it back to taxpayers. But in my mind, any time we're giving money back to the taxpayers, I think it's probably a positive thing that I could support. But then we got to her budget address and it was curious because I was very quiet about how much she was going to talk about spending and she blew the doors out. The budget proposal that she has, which is usually the lowest starting point in this whole budget process, is $252 billion. It's an 8% increase on state funds, I think seven point on all funds percent. And, you know, that's simply the trajectory that I've talked about on this show, I talk about anywhere I go that New York cannot afford to continue on. And I know revenue has been coming in pretty well in this state, but it doesn't seem like there's a political will, either governor or the two majorities to cut taxes. And ultimately, the problem is we're losing people in New York State because it's too expensive to live here. And I didn't see much in this budget other than those few things I mentioned that's going to change that trajectory. So I was sort of disappointed in her budget address. The $252 billion, we're going to be, you know, we spend the most and tax most of any citizens in the United States. And it simply it's just not a system that we can continue on with.

GR: Well, you've anticipated the question I always ask at this time of the year of the two of you or others. And Senator May, I'll kind of just channel what Leader Barclay just said and say, I did want to get your reaction to sort of the big picture of the budget, you know, putting it in context because when you think about specific programs like the ones that you mentioned, you know, it is compelling. I mean, you know, there are good things that you want to do with those things. But, you know, it is this, if my understanding is, it's another record high budget and New York is always on the top or near the top of the list of tax burden relative to other states. The last time I checked, we are still projected to have outmigration from the state that, you know, may cost us another congressional seat the next time we do a census. So, I mean, Senator May, how should New Yorkers be viewing the state's spending and the future trajectory of the state spending from kind of this bigger picture? I don't know if there's a crisp question there, but you have the specific programs that are compelling, but when you look at the whole thing, it does seem like there's a problem.

RM: Well, I will say we are actually being very fiscally responsible, not like increasing deficits or that kind of thing. We have a lot more money to handle some of the real problems in the state because we increased, we made modest increases on the super wealthy a few years ago, everybody predicted that they would all move out of the state when we did that. But in fact, we have more millionaires and billionaires in the state now than we had before, and they are way wealthier than they were before. So that's one of the reasons why the state is bringing in more funds. And honestly, the Republicans in the Senate complain about this every year and then they say, and why don't we have more money for this, this, this, this and this? So it's like, everybody wants more money. We are facing a situation where the Trump administration is probably going to take away a lot of funds that we have depended on, like for Medicaid. And so we have to be making investments now that we can make so that we can put ourselves in a position to weather the storm that is coming, because we can certainly expect to be in the crosshairs of the Trump administration. I do think some of the investments are really good ones. The $200 million for upstate, we were asking for more than that, but I'm glad she put that in there for upstate. I think, you know, really thinking about ways to beef up our infrastructure, get us in position to weather both the climate storms that are approaching and the political storms that are approaching. I think this is a smart way to spend the money.

GR: I want to come back to the Medicaid issue, you brought up something that that I did want to pursue, but Leader Barclay, I’ll come back to you. The senator mentioned the extra tax on millionaires and my understanding is that this calls for the earlier, I guess, renewal of that tax before it was set to expire. Is that, what is your view on that? I mean, would it be possible would it be smart to double down on that effort and to and to really try to get more money out of the very, very wealthiest in New York State? Because, particularly downstate, the senator is right, we've got a lot of those people. New York City has a high concentration of them relative to other parts of the country. So is that one way to go?

WB: Well, first of all, I've never seen a tax that's been instituted in New York State that doesn't continue on. So, which, the Senator is talking about is altering the millionaire's tax so it's put on when we had a fiscal crisis. And oh, we’ll just put it on a few years, but lo and behold, we're not a fiscal crisis now, apparently. But guess what? We're going to take the sunset off and extend that tax going forward. Now, the Senator points out that there's, you know, millionaires and billionaires in the state and they may have increased, but everything's increased. And New York State is growing those millionaires and billionaires at a lower rate than any other state in the country. So, you know, they may not be leaving, but they are leaving New York State. And to further things, the more dependent you get on these wealthy people to cover your revenue requirements in the state, you know, you can just lose a couple of them and that becomes a huge hole in your budget that, in fact, that happened in New York City just a few years ago when, you know, there were something like 29 billionaires were responsible for something like 35%, 40% of New York City's budget. A couple of them left and they had some real deficits on it. So again, it's just not a sustainable system going forward, we have to look at ways. For instance, the governor says on the rebate program, sales tax, we, because inflation, the state's got a windfall from sales tax, which is great. But why don't we look at reducing sales tax? There is a so-called regressive tax that I would think some of the Democrats would want to look at to maybe ease the burden on that. But no, we don't want to do that, we'll just take your money and hand it back, and not back to everybody, just a few, you know, some of the people we, you know, we want to try to be helpful to. So to me, again, it's just more tax and spend more tax and spend in New York. And we're going to just end up with the same results that we've been seeing with people flocking out of our state, unfortunately.

RM: We actually have the lowest middle class tax rates in 70 years and we have been cutting those. And one of the reasons is because we've been able to, you know, have the super wealthy pay a little bit more of their fair share. We have a situation in America where the richest few have gotten infinitely richer. Our state budget is about one Jeff Bezos this year and about 1.6 of a Elon Musk. And we we're seeing people get extremely wealthy and we're seeing ordinary people just falling behind and falling behind. And so we're trying to make the investments in reversing that trend here in New York State. And so far, it's, you know, this budget, I think, shows that that's working to some extent.

WB: One thing I'd ask is, are people leaving New York State because their taxes aren't high enough? Are they leaving New York State because, you know, the cost to live here? They're leaving New York because there is an affordable crisis. They're going to states with lower tax burdens. I mean, it just is evident, it's happening. So we're just going to continue on that same path that we've been on? It doesn't, you know, the facts are the facts.

RM: Most of the evidence is people are leaving because housing is too expensive and we don't have enough of it. And so the more we have more and more housing, the better. But, you know, we've got all these difficulties with local governments refusing to permit more housing, with, you know, zoning codes that are so restrictive that we, it's really hard to build more housing. And so that revolving fund money, the whole point of that is to make it more affordable for developers to build more housing so that they can get the housing that we need.

WB: I think we ought to look at the costs of why housing is so expensive in New York. Developers don't want to take the risk because it's incredibly hard to build a new house in New York. Even upstate is really, really expensive because we put all these requirements on these developers to do it. You know, it's just getting worse instead of better. We now want, you know, heat pumps in every house. Looks like it's going to be $26,000 more money if you require that. So it's just one thing after another in New York State that makes no one want to take the risk of developing housing. That's one of the reasons we have high housing costs.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with New York State Senator Rachel May and New York State Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay. And we've been having a very spirited discussion about the upcoming legislative session and the larger picture of spending and the size of government in New York State. Senator May, before the break, you wanted to get in (what) leader Barclay had been focusing on, the number of regulations and new requirements that the state puts on housing as a major contributor to its increase in costs, because developers don't want to take that risk unless they know they're going to get a certain kind of return and just making it more expensive itself to build the houses. That makes sense to me, just thinking of some of my own personal experiences, but you had a response that you wanted to make to that.

RM: Yeah, well, I agree about the regulation, and that's why I have carried several bills that are designed to reduce the kinds of regulations that make it really expensive to build housing. We have one, and the governor picked it up in her budget, it's about the environmental review process for multifamily housing, which is, you know, there are really good reasons to not want to be damaging wetlands or having toxins in the soils or something where you're building housing and I definitely think we need to keep that kind of environmental review. But the review process has been so onerous and has opened projects to lawsuits to such an extent that it becomes almost impossible to build multi-family housing in infill areas, places where there's already public transportation, for example, or walkable communities that the lawsuits that they get hit with are so frequent. And they delay the projects so much that a lot of times they just don't get built and the developers end up building sprawl development way out in a cornfield somewhere, which is not good for the environment either. So we are trying to streamline that and the governor agrees that we should do that. I had a bill last year that got put in the budget that was about new configurations of multifamily housing that make it easier to build more affordable housing and more pleasant kinds of housing for families. So we're working on some of those regulations. I think something like the heat pumps, if we can electrify the buildings, in the long run they will be much cheaper to operate and safer. We won't have all of the dangers of gas in the houses. So you know, sometimes things are more expensive, but in general, I think we are working on the regulations to make it affordable to build more housing.

GR: Okay, I want to get into two big issues with the time we have left. Leader Barclay, I'll ask you my Medicaid question. When I've looked at the New York Medicaid program, it really is mind boggling because of the per capita expense of this program that we have in this state. And it's double or more than double that of California, which just blew my mind when I first realized that. So it's obviously a huge part of the budget. And my impression, though, is that neither party is really serious about doing any serious thinking about how you would go about trimming that back. You hear about waste, fraud and abuse, but at some point some hard decisions are going to get made. And I just, you know, every year when this budget comes out, I see the Medicaid part. Does your party have any plan for doing something about that?

WB: Well, one, I would totally agree with you, Grant. The idea that trying to find a solution to the Medicaid growth is very difficult because it's going to take those hard decisions to make. And unfortunately, you know, we've made some decisions over the last decade or so. Where, just increased the idea, let’s just increase Medicaid programs as much as we could in New York because we would get the federal reimbursement for that, with no guarantee that that was always going to be the case. And maybe in the future, the Medicaid federal portion is going to go down, what are we going to do with that? We have, you know, really high levels of income to still, you know, still qualify for Medicaid in New York. There's been a huge increase over the last, since, I guess, you know, maybe the last six or seven years. And then, you know, every health care organization is dependent on those Medicaid dollars. So somewhere along the line we’ve got to look at it. And it's not incentivizing the right efficiencies in the system because there is ultimately going to be winners and losers in that. And when there's winners and losers, those (unintelligible) get very, very difficult. But, you know, that's what we need leadership from the governor. She probably needs to spend some political capital, and is probably going to go against some of her constituencies that don't want to see that. But, you know, if she could do that, I would be with her. If that meant the overall lowering the tax and spend budget she has.

GR: So, Senator, May, it's tough to talk about this without really getting into the policy weeds and I'll try to summarize what I'm about to say as quickly as I can. But you mentioned something that really caught my attention, which was a concern that you have that under Trump, the federal portion of Medicaid is going to go down and that's going to hurt New York State and it will hurt a lot of other, “blue” states. Prior to Obamacare, this is what I understand, prior to Obamacare, the reimbursement to the states varied from 50% to 75% depending on the states. New York was in the 50% category, so it's a 50/50 split. But then the extra part of Medicaid to bring all the states up, and New York was already pretty high, that part the federal government has paid all or most of that additional expense. I think I've got that about right. So I'm very curious, though, what are you worried about that the Trump administration's going to go after here in this Medicaid formula?

RM: Well, reproductive health first and foremost, but also just in general, they are trying to figure out how to cut federal support for the poor, for people they don't like, whether it's immigrants or LGBTQ folks. So they are strategically trying to figure out how to attack the groups that they have gained so much political capital by demonizing. And we are worried about that. I was at an event yesterday, the Bipartisan Pro-Choice Caucus in the legislature, which isn't actually bipartisan, had a series of presentations from experts about the kinds of ways that both executive orders and taking advantage of right wing judges who are making really extreme decisions in different ways that the administration can really interrupt our ability to offer the kinds of reproductive health care that our population expects.

GR: So and then Leader Barclay, I'll bring you in on something related to this. But, so the way I understand what you're saying then is, the strategy is going to be going after covering certain kinds of things that are related to these other groups or, in that way, then putting federal restrictions on if you're getting Medicaid dollars, you can't spend them on X, Y, and Z and it comes back to that. And so that's going to be the mechanism then, rather than just, we're going to go from 50%, I thought maybe you were saying there's going to be an effort to say we're going to change your formula from 50% to 40% or 30%.

RM: Well, we don’t know. How can we possibly know? Their stock in trade is throwing curve balls and making it impossible to plan ahead. So my expectation is that that kind of change can't happen as fast as some of the other changes that they're making. But, you know, it wouldn't be this year's budget, but next year's budget that it would affect. But we'll see.

GR: Okay, interesting. I'd be stunned to see if you could get the change in the formula writ large across the board, through the Senate. But I understand what you're talking about in terms of targeting, you know, certain kinds of procedures that then are to the benefit of certain people. But Leader Barclay, I want to bring you in on this. More generally, what the senator is talking about relates to this more general point, more generally after Trump was elected in November, there was a conversation in a lot of states, mostly among Democrats, about whether the states are going to form a resistance, you know, what's going to be done in in light of this, and even some competition you know, who's going to be the leader of it? Is it going to be Gavin Newsom in California is going to be Kathy Hochul in New York? What's your sense of where the mindset is now? Is this is New York going to be sort of a fortress of resistance? And if that's the case, if that's what you're getting from the governor or other leaders, is there a danger there of kind of putting yourself in such stark opposition to the presidency?

WB: No doubt. You know, I was pleased right after the election that it seemed the governor softened, maybe her former viewpoints on the president, but now she seems to be ramping that back up. You know, I always think it's best to try to work with somebody before you start attacking them. We just got through an election where the president won, you know, not only the electoral vote, but won the popular vote. So clearly, there is a move in this country that people want change. They want change from the last four years of the Biden administration. It seems to me the president ran on a bunch of these things and he's acting on those things currently. So, New York could, I guess, try to put up some, I don't know what specifically you would do, but some try to Trump-proof New York. But I think you do that your own political peril. And I'm not sure New Yorkers are so in agreement for trying to Trump-proof New York.

GR: Well, Senator May we've got about a minute and a half left. I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that, I mean because it sounds like you see yourself as part of this resistance. Can you talk a little bit about kind of the strategy and how it might end up benefiting the state rather than hurting the state?

RM: Yeah, well, let me start by saying we had this interview two years ago together, and Leader Barclay said that Trump was a thing of the past, that we didn't have to think about him anymore, that he was so damaged by the by the January 6th insurrection that we were going to move on from him and I feel like we are in this ‘Alice in Wonderland’ kind of rabbit hole situation where responsible Republicans are refusing to hold him accountable in any possible way. He wasn't held accountable for that, he hasn't been held accountable for appointing really dangerous people to his cabinet. It looks like the Senate is going to cave on those appointees. And so we are…

WB: How about the people, Senator, how about the people that voted for Trump?

RM: Sorry?

WB: How about the majority of Americans who voted for Trump? He won the popular vote.

RM: He didn’t get a majority, he got a plurality.

WB: Plurality. He won more votes than Kamala Harris.

RM: Right. And so many people were saying…

WB: Because they’re dumb? They don’t know what they’re talking about?

RM: …really going to do what he says he’s going to do, we’re just going to vote for him because he’s…

WB: We’re dumb. We’re dumb, we don’t know what he’s going to do, but we just want change?

RM: No, but like, he kept saying he was going to bring down grocery prices and then almost the instant he was elected, he said, well, honestly, I can't really do that. So he was presenting a set of policies that he couldn't actually carry out.

GR: I hate to I hate to do this, but we…

WB: Unlike Kamala Harris, who was, she was being truthful and honest about everything she ran on and people are just, they just got caught up in the whole thing and they didn't know what they were doing, so they voted for Trump because he was, fooled everybody. Is that, was that the sort of idea?

GR: Well, I am sure the two of you, at this point I am sure the two of you are not going to find common ground on this president.

WB: No.

GR: But I do appreciate both of you making the time, we'll have to leave it there. Obviously, the next year is going to bring up a lot of strong political feelings and views and we saw those here today. That was New York State Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay and New York State Senator Rachel May. I want to thank both of you for taking time and I want to wish you both good luck with this session. It sounds like one way or another it's going to be interesting. So thanks to both of you.

WB: Thanks for having me on.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

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