They’re running up the bill.
Bronx residents in state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie’s district decried spiking utility bills Monday — as the state Legislature pushes back on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s cost-saving bid to delay New York’s controversial climate law mandates.
The complaints come as lawmakers, led by Heastie and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, are poised to split with Hochul over her push to delay the climate law, as well as to reform car insurance — two major sticking points in state budget talks.
“Anything that you pay less is better for everybody,” said Francisco Perez, 36, a Baychester resident visiting Heastie’s constituent office.
Perez groused that his utility bills have caused a financial strain as they shot up to $160 a month. He supports scrapping the climate law’s mandates if it’d lower his bills.
As Hochul mounts a re-election bid this year, she’s pushing her proposed climate law delay and car-insurance reform as voter-friendly “affordability” measures.
The meat of Hochul’s car-insurance proposal aims to cut New York’s sky-high $4,000 yearly premiums by changing the state’s squishy “serious injury” threshold — part of the state’s broader rules that allow people to collect big bucks for vaguely defined “pain and suffering.”
The proposal also calls to cap damages for pain and suffering claimed by drivers who are at-fault, uninsured or committing a felony as crashes occurred. And it proposes allowing prosecutors seek criminal penalties against any person responsible for staging crashes — a bid to crackdown on fraud.
But the marquee hangup appears to be the climate law delay.
Closed door talks began in earnest two weeks ago, though little progress was made in the first week as Hochul waited to lay out details of her proposal to effectively move back the state’s Climate Act’s 2030 targets.
She finally released that plan March 20, calling to push the climate deadlines to 2040. Doing so would delay mandates that could see New Yorkers paying up to $4,000 a year for natural gas and oil households, as well as $2.23 more per gallon at the gas pump, she argued.
Democratic lawmakers and environmentalists who backed the law cast Hochul’s move as a betrayal, arguing the effects of climate change will drive up costs far more than the law’s mandates. Embracing renewable green energy will save New Yorkers money, both in the near- and long-term, they argued.
Heastie has not specifically voiced his own opposition to Hochul’s climate law changes, but his chamber and the state Senate appear poised to stand against.
Beatriz Coronel — the former chair of Bronx Community Board 12 — said she’s on board with delaying the law if helps curb her $260-a-month heat and electric bills.
“I feel like it should be curbed. There are like no regulations,” she said.
“In the Bronx, we get charged more because it’s a hot spot.”
Another Bronx resident who visited Heastie’s office — Minerva Diaz, 68 — said lawmakers should help soaring utility bills costs. Her own bills now stand at $156 a month.
“We elected them to help us. This is the time they should help us,” she said, although she acknowledged the environment could suffer if the climate law is delayed.
“Sometimes that has to happen,” she said about utility rates being raised.
The disagreements over the hot-potato topics likely will push the talks past their April 1 deadline, insiders said.
“There’s a lot of things floating around there. But those two have taken up the bulk of the attention and time,” state Sen. Michael Gianaris, the chamber’s deputy Democratic leader, told reporters last week about the three-way talks.
Hochul’s office is prepping an extender for the near-certainty that the governor and lawmakers blow the midnight Tuesday deadline, sources said.
The extension is likely to go through next week, forcing Albany lawmakers to return during a slated week off coinciding with Passover, the sources said.
The blown budget deadline has become an annual ritual for Hochul and Albany lawmakers as the governor uses the talks as leverage to push measures less favorable to lefty lawmakers in the Legislature, such as a rollback of criminal justice reforms last year.
