O’Mara: Hochul's massive budget plan stays focused on 'spend, spend, spend'

Albany, N.Y., February 1-—State Senator Tom O’Mara (R,C-Big Flats) today said that Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed 2023-2024, $227-billion state budget remains a “spend, spend, spend strategy that’s a billion miles away from making New York State more affordable for taxpayers.”

Like he did following Hochul’s State of the State message in early January, O’Mara warned that the state’s Democrat leaders, like they have for the past several years, are once again eyeing long-term commitments for higher state spending that will require tax increases, more state borrowing, and an unsustainable debt burden for taxpayers. Last year’s $220-billion spending plan left New York with the nation’s second-highest state budget, behind only California.

O’Mara predicted that Hochul and the Democrat-led Senate and Assembly will enact a final budget that significantly increases New York’s spending again this year and leave state and local taxpayers shouldering a long-term, unsustainable burden. He noted that the governor’s proposal already calls for increasing the current state budget by $7 billion, even before final negotiations with legislative leaders.

O’Mara said, “Governor Hochul’s proposed budget remains a spend, spend, spend strategy that shells out billions of taxpayer dollars but remains a billion miles away from making New York State more affordable for taxpayers. It largely ignores the reality that New York State remains one of America’s highest-taxed, least affordable, most debt-ridden and overregulated states, and that we’re leading the nation in population loss. The spending habits of this government under one-party, all-Democrat control can only make New York a more expensive place to live and do business. There’s nothing in this plan that seriously addresses the need for lower taxes across the board, less regulation, debt reduction, mandate relief, or any of the other strangleholds on state and local taxpayers, small businesses and manufacturers, and continually hard-pressed upstate communities, economies, and workers.”

O’Mara was recently reappointed as the Ranking Republican member on the Senate Finance Committee which oversees the Legislature’s annual budget adoption process.

Joint Senate-Assembly budget hearings are scheduled to begin next week.

At the start of the new legislative session in early January, O’Mara and other members of the Senate GOP unveiled a “Rescue New York” legislative agenda that proposes a range of policies focusing on public safety and security, economic growth and job creation, tax relief and regulatory reform, and affordability initiatives to try to reverse New York’s nation-leading population loss.