Hochul’s State of the State shows she has a ways to go to prove she’s right for New York

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul delivered her first State of the State handle Wednesday.
REUTERS

Gov. Kathy Hochul stored her maiden State of the State handle quick and candy. Cuomo-esque, fortunately, it was not.

Alas, it additionally failed to indicate that she’s on high of the important thing points dogging New York.

Components of her speech appeared like a love notice to Mayor Eric Adams, with a number of references to her “partnership with New York Metropolis.” That’s a refreshing break from the final eight years of Andrew Cuomo-Invoice de Blasio sparring.

But her supposedly daring imaginative and prescient got here off as a laundry record of things meant to please choose constituencies.

For householders and the enterprise group, she supplied some property-tax aid and coronavirus-related tax credit — and a plan to reinstate the favored “Drinks-to-Go” possibility for struggling bars and eating places. All nice. However her different concepts included the standard liberal goodies for particular pursuits: health-care, training and “inexperienced” initiatives, for instance, and opening up authorities contracting for minority- and women-owned companies.

Too dangerous she by no means stated how she’d pay for all of it — besides, that's, when she referred to as on voters to authorize a further $4 billion environmental bond act. (Extra spending, extra taxes. After all!)

Nor did she speak a lot of her unpopular COVID-19 mandates or give any clue as to once they may be lifted so life for New Yorkers can get again to regular.

To her credit score, she did be aware of the inhabitants exodus that occurred in the course of the pandemic and vowed to provide those that fled purpose to return, pledging to create the “most business-friendly and worker-friendly state within the nation.” Hmm: We’ll see.

On the identical time, she was largely silent on significant steps to rein in a single main supply of that outward flight: the surge in crime. Certainly, she utterly steered away from the controversial no-bail and criminal-justice reforms enacted beneath Cuomo, providing as a substitute new “jails-to-jobs” and prison-education applications and stepping up illegal-gun tracing. As for locking away dangerous guys: crickets.

One different good signal: She desires to scrap the state’s farcical ethics panel, the Joint Fee on Public Ethics, although she supplied no particulars on what she’d create as a replacement.

Sure, on steadiness, it might’ve been worse: She’s operating for governor and dealing with strain from radical progressives within the Democratic Get together however stored her guarantees to them to a minimal. It’ll be the actions she takes quickly, although, that may inform simply how accountable a gov she plans to be.