A View from the Assembly Chamber

A report on my first legislative session

I ran for the State Assembly last year because I still believe that the legislative process — for all of its flaws — is one of the most powerful tools we have to solve difficult problems at scale and make people’s lives better, and because I felt that I could make a meaningful contribution to that process. With my first session on the books, I thought it might be worthwhile to try and articulate how I approached the work, and report out on achievements (TL;DR: 34 bills introduced, six passed) and disappointments.

Crafting and Advancing a Legislative Agenda

There were 9,000 bills introduced this year in the Assembly. Many of them address specific, technical issues. And many of these are, indeed, important. But at a time when the world — and our democracy — so often feels like it’s burning, I decided to focus on legislation that would have as broad and as substantive of an impact as possible.

That was my orientation as I headed to Albany in January. I set a simple “impact standard” for whether or not to introduce a bill: Does it meaningfully address a problem that a significant number of New Yorkers are concerned about — or, at least, would be concerned about if they knew about it?

I shied away from topics that were already well-covered by colleagues, and from bills that were too similar to other legislation already introduced. I did not pursue ideas that I did not believe had a shot, in the end, of garnering the support of the lion’s share of my Democratic colleagues, given the rule of thumb in the Assembly that any bill brought to the floor must be set to pass with votes from roughly 80 or more of the 103 Democrats in the house.¹ And with the sweeping damage that is being done by the Trump Administration to the laws, liberties, and programs that New Yorkers depend on, I focused in particular on developing legislation that is responsive to what is happening at the federal level.

In the end, I introduced 34 bills this session. Roughly a third were aimed at fighting back against Trump. Many I wrote myself; others were written by State Senators who invited me to partner with them; several were introduced in previous years, sometimes with different specifics, by legislators who have since retired; a few were drafted by outside groups, a practice in Albany that has grown more standard than it should be; and in one notable instance I worked together with the State Attorney General to craft and advance legislation.

“Working a Bill”

A key piece of advice I got early on was that I would need to “work a bill” if I wanted it to pass. What that meant was that I couldn’t sit back and assume that the legislative process would take its course, with bills propelled by their merits — there is simply too much competition for the bandwidth of all of the players in our highly byzantine and idiosyncratic legislative process. The real path by which a bill becomes a law in New York is less Schoolhouse Rock and more a mix of improvisational jazz and whack-a-mole.

“Working a bill” roughly describes all the things a legislator can do to push a piece of legislation forward: lining up co-sponsors, generating positive media attention, meeting with Assembly staff to work through substantive and legal issues, lining up support from key advocacy groups, refuting objections or addressing them through amendments, responding to questions from Assembly colleagues, and pleading your case to those with decision-making authority.

It’s hard to do this for more than a few bills at once. I was further constrained by time: since the process of negotiating and passing the State budget this year consumed almost all legislative energy and attention through early May, the window for advancing legislation ended up as a six-week sprint before the end of the session in mid-June.

Another limiting factor: Almost all of my bills, if they ever reached the floor of the Assembly, were likely to be debated by Republicans. This is different from what happens with the majority of the bills that get votes, which are passed “on consent” — without debate. This meant that my bills would consume “floor time” — the scarcest resource of all in the legislative process. Given the need for the Assembly to balance the priorities of its many members, it’s a bigger ask and a heavier lift to get a vote on a bill that’s going to take up substantial floor time. My focus on introducing meatier bills, therefore, was also going to limit the number of bills I would be able to get over the line.

All of this, taken together with my status as a freshman legislator, meant that I had to set a handful of priorities and fight hard for them.

Triage and Just Keep Pushing

Each Assembly member is formally asked to submit a list of 15 priority bills, on which you get feedback from relevant committee chairs and staff and, with enough green lights, a vote at the committee level. Based in large part on the early feedback in that process, I was able to make a threshold judgment about whether, with limited time, a given bill had a chance of passage in this session.

For example, a number of my bills dealing with federal power raised questions about constitutionality, and I determined that those questions were unlikely to be answered to everyone’s satisfaction in six weeks. Other bills — such as one to create financial incentives for scaffolding to come down quickly, and another to expand the Senior Citizens Rent Increase Exemption (SCRIE) program — had potential fiscal implications for the City of New York’s budget. Without formal support from the mayor’s office, which I knew was not forthcoming, these were going to be a tough sell. Still others faced concerns from relevant committee chairs.

And so I narrowed my real priority list down to seven or eight bills that both met the moment and seemed like they had a shot. Everything would come down to the final five or six days of the session, during which the Assembly, often going late into the night, passes hundreds of bills. The toughest decisions facing the Assembly’s leadership about which bills get to the floor are often deferred until these final days. I knew that one of my bills, the FAIR Business Practices Act, which faced significant business group opposition, would be in this touch-and-go category.

And so, as that period approached, I focused like a laser on the FAIR Business Practices Act, feeling that if that bill, and only that bill, got done, I could feel good about the session. Quality over quantity. But I also knew that it might not make it, and so I woke up every morning in Albany thinking about what I could do that day to push each bill on my shortlist a bit further down the field.

When the dust settled, the FAIR Business Practices Act got done (with some significant concessions), and so did my bills on renewable energy, housing discrimination, and protections for rent-stabilized tenants. Each of these involved robust debates with my Republican colleagues, which I generally enjoyed. A number of other bills that I was invested in, sponsored by colleagues, also got done. And, of course, there were some real disappointments.

“Trump-Proofing” Consumer Protection: The FAIR Business Practices Act

I was proud to partner with Attorney General Letitia James and State Senator Leroy Comrie in sponsoring legislation to comprehensively update – for the first time in 45 years – New York State law on consumer protection and corporate misconduct. Our bill, the “Fostering Affordability and Integrity through Reasonable (FAIR) Business Practices Act,” aims to strengthen the Attorney General’s authority to stop corporate misconduct that takes advantage of consumers. It comes at a critical time, as the Trump Administration turns out the lights at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and shuts down consumer protection work at the Federal level.

The bill faced enormous opposition from various corporate interests, particularly in the financial services industry, that were happy to see the Federal government withdrawing from the work of consumer protection. They fought the FAIR Business Practices Act tooth-and-nail, and it seemed, even after we amended the bill in response to objections,² as though they had us beat. We had a breakthrough in the final hours of the last night that the State Senate was meeting; it was so late, in fact, when Sen. Comrie brought the bill to the Senate floor, that the lobbyists fighting us had gone home and to sleep believing that it was dead and they had won. A few days later, I passed the bill in the Assembly in one of our final acts of the session.

Ensuring that Wind and Solar Energy Projects Can Move Forward

New York State has ambitious climate goals that we are struggling to meet, and we can’t build new wind and solar energy projects fast enough. On this issue, too, the Trump Administration is pulling out all the stops to halt progress.

One of the tools that Trump’s allies at the local level use to stop wind and solar projects is to tax them to death. Projects that aren’t economically viable don’t get built. That’s why I introduced legislation to resolve years of court battles and finally establish a consistent and predictable statewide tax assessment structure for wind and solar projects. The bill was supported by all the leading climate and renewable energy advocacy organizations, and was passed after a vigorous debate in the Assembly.

Protecting Fair Housing Enforcement in New York

President Trump is stripping away the Federal government’s capacity to take action against housing discrimination by repealing the legal standard — known as “disparate impact” — used to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968. (Fun fact: Trump was, himself, a defendant in one of the Federal government’s early fair housing enforcement actions, as a landlord in Brooklyn in 1973.)

While New York has laws prohibiting housing discrimination, those laws also rely on the federal disparate impact standard. Early in this legislative session, I introduced legislation to codify the disparate impact standard into State law, so that New Yorkers will continue to have legal protections from housing discrimination, come what may in Washington. This bill was passed by the Assembly on June 6th and by the Senate a few days later.

Expanding Protections for Rent-Stabilized Tenants

Several years ago, the Legislature passed into law a set of protections related to the “security deposits” that tenants pay to landlords when an apartment is first leased out. In general, these protections codified into law industry-standard practices to ensure that a tenant gets his or her security deposit back unless there is damage to the apartment.

The new law, however, did not apply to the roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments in New York City. Together with Senate Housing Chair Brian Kavanagh, I proposed legislation to include rent-stabilized tenants in these protections, and it was passed this session.

Other Victories: Fighting Antisemitism, Protecting Worker Rights, and More

In addition to the bills I passed, there were other paths to change.

I worked hard during the State budget process (which, confusingly, is not confined to funding the state government but also involves significant policy-making) back in March and April, to advance important policy goals. I was a strong advocate for making thoughtful changes to the State discovery law so that — without diminishment of due process — our District Attorneys can more effectively do their jobs, and wrote bills that were adopted in the budget, and became law, to create a public revolving loan fund for affordable housing and to make it more likely that people with serious mental illness get the help they need.

And, at the end of session, I was also involved in advancing a number of bills introduced by colleagues:

• I worked closely with Assemblymember Nily Rozic on her legislation to require every college in New York to have a Title VI Coordinator: a centralized official responsible for enforcing civil rights protections under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and corresponding state laws. This legislation was spurred by and responsive to rising incidents of antisemitism on college campuses, but it goes further than that to protect the rights of all students to pursue their education free from harassment and discrimination.

• Together with Assembly Labor Committee Chair Harry Bronson, I helped write a bill that would expand the jurisdiction of the State’s Employee Relations Board to cover any group of employees that loses the protection of the National Labor Relations Board. This will ensure that basic labor protections and the rights of workers to organize remain intact in New York State.

• I co-sponsored legislation, also by Assemblymember Bronson, to expand State legal protections for medical professionals who provide reproductive healthcare and gender-affirming care.

• I was a vocal advocate for the New York HEAT Act, sponsored by Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon, which was a comprehensive bill to wean New York off our fossil fuel dependency. While I was disappointed that the bill didn’t pass (more on this below), I was pleased that we enacted an important component of it, to eliminate the legal requirement that all utility rate-payers have to cover the cost of new homes’ gas hook-ups (which has historically incentivized, at our collective expense, continued dependency on gas instead of transitioning to electric).

Disappointments on Immigration, the Environment, and Housing Supply

One of the most frustrating things about Albany is that it’s far easier to defeat a bill than it is to pass one. There were a number of things we didn’t do in Albany that left me — and many of my colleagues — frustrated and disappointed.

On immigration, the New York for All bill, sponsored in the Assembly by Karines Reyes, would have substantially limited cooperation between state and local authorities and ICE as it carries out a cruel and fascistic agenda that involves masked agents sweeping people up off the street. New York for All was the subject of a great deal of internal discussion and debate, and I spoke up as forcefully as I knew how in favor of action. But in the end it was not enough. There were other bills to protect immigrant New Yorkers — including legislation that I sponsor to make schools, hospitals, houses of worship, shelters, and certain other locations off-limits for civil arrest by immigration authorities — that also remained stuck in committee. Along with many of my colleagues, I am determined to keep up the fight.

We also did not act on the two most significant pieces of environmental legislation under consideration this session, New York HEAT and the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act (PRRIA). I was a proud co-sponsor of both of these bills. As mentioned above, we did pass a significant component of New York HEAT. But despite the herculean efforts of PRRIA’s Assembly sponsor, Deborah Glick, a fierce lobbying effort by industry groups carried the day. It is fair, I think, to say the bad guys won. For now.

And, for another year, the Legislature failed to take any meaningful action to increase housing supply in New York. Assemblymember Brian Cunningham’s Faith-Based Affordable Housing Act died on the vine. And a bill that I carry, which would merely require localities to publicly report their zoning requirements and how much new housing they have permitted, didn’t move out of committee. As I’ve written before, if we want to tackle the affordability crisis in New York, we need to build more housing, and a lot of it. At some point, the Legislature must be willing to break from a policy of total deference to local policies that effectively mean a freeze on new housing.

The Work Continues

There is much more that could be written about this session, but this report has already exceeded what any reasonable person would want to know.

I am filled with gratitude to my team members, who worked tirelessly with me to make all of this happen, while providing outstanding service to our constituents; to the leadership and staff of the State Assembly, who must keep an infinite number of plates spinning, and who nonetheless were unfailingly supportive and responsive; to my colleagues, who represent the vast diversity of our state with honor and intelligence, and who provided encouragement and advice to me throughout the session; and to the many constituents, activists, and advocates who pour their time and energy into pushing elected officials like me to be better.

I’ll close where I started: with my belief in the power and value of the legislative process, and my recognition of its flaws, both validated by my first session in the Assembly. Suffice it to say, there is plenty more to do next year, and I am looking forward to it.

1. This is because of longstanding Assembly policy only to pass bills that have majority support counting votes exclusively from the Democratic conference, thereby marginalizing Assembly Republicans. One can debate the wisdom of this policy, but it is firmly in place.

2. The original bill expanded the authority of the State Attorney General and also the ability of individual New Yorkers to sue (a “private right of action”) when they are taken advantage of. At the outset, almost all of the opposition to the bill from industry groups and their lobbyists centered on the private right of action, and it became clear that the pushback was sufficiently strong that we would not be able to overcome it. So we narrowed the bill to focus solely on the Attorney General. To my dismay, but not entirely to my surprise, a number of the groups that had previously said — likely in an effort to sound reasonable — that they would accept the bill’s expansion of the Attorney General’s authority suddenly changed their tune, and continued to fight the amended bill, believing they had us on the ropes. In the end, the amendments we made to the bill diminished the opposition just enough to get it done. I do think the stronger bill was the better bill.