Democrats propose 'Office of Resilience' for climate crises
Originally published in
Times Union
on
.
ALBANY — When state Sen. Shelley Mayer’s downstate district was struck by Hurricane Ida in 2021, she spent the aftermath of the storm negotiating help from a range of different state agencies.
The Westchester County Democrat turned to the Department of Transportation for help restoring transit systems, contacted the Department of Education about her district’s flooded schools, and worked with the Department of Financial Services to fight denials of flood insurance coverage. In total, she said, she worked with "probably seven” separate agencies.
“That’s a huge amount of work,” Mayer said during a Monday news conference at the state Capitol. “We dealt with almost every agency I can think of.”
Mayer is now a co-sponsor of legislation designed to make responding to similar crises easier for state and local officials. Dubbed the “Climate Resilient New York Act,” the new bill would add an “Office of Resilience” to the state’s executive branch, consolidating the state response to floods, storms and wildfires.
The office would be headed by a “chief resilience officer,” appointed by the governor, who would oversee a resilience coordinator in each state agency. It’s intended to serve as a clearinghouse, disseminating information about climate risks to state municipalities and agencies. The office would also be tasked with tracking New York’s progress toward a new set of statewide “resilience goals,” prioritizing infrastructure upgrades, nature conservation and tree canopy expansion, according to the legislation.
“We are already paying for climate change,” said Democratic state Sen. Pete Harckham, the bill’s sponsor in the Senate. “This is already costing us billions of dollars; it will cost us billions of dollars in the future. We can hit our carbon targets tomorrow and we will still have the impacts of climate change. They’re only going to get worse.”
Harckham, who also represents Westchester County, estimated that the office would cost around “$6 or $7 million” to get off the ground — a “relatively low ask,” he said — and noted that it would be able to tap existing staff from different agencies to serve as resilience coordinators.
Harckham believes the office would save state money in the long run by easing the need for relief when natural disasters do occur. The bill, he said, is intended to improve linkages between the different agencies and municipalities that share responsibility during natural disasters. It would also shore up the state’s disaster response infrastructure amid funding cuts at the federal level.
Last week, hundreds of federal employees were laid off from the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as part of President Donald J. Trump’s purge of the federal workforce. The offices are responsible for predicting and monitoring major weather events including hurricanes and tornadoes.
“The cuts to the National Weather Service, of which we have offices in Albany and New York City, could prove devastating when storms come to New York,” said Jeremy Cherson, an advocate with the Hudson River conservation group Riverkeeper. “We are not able to rely on the federal government to help us prepare for climate change. The state really has to step up and take the responsibility in its own hands.”
The new office would follow the precedent of a handful of other states, including New Jersey, that have established similar entities.
Environmental Defense Fund advocate Kate Boicourt said Gov. Kathy Hochul had expressed support for the proposal during preliminary discussions.