Public Affairs
New York State’s $237 billion budget recently passed, funding vital government services and moving forward a host of policy initiatives that will impact the lives of the state’s 20 million residents. We caught up with Loren Amor—our head of Albany Public Affairs and a former top staffer in the state Senate—to discuss his reflections on New York’s latest budget.
Q: What are your overall impressions of this year’s budget? What role did BerlinRosen play in the process?
A: Budgets are about priorities, and this year’s spending plan is no exception.
The final budget, which passed in mid-April, reflects the policies and funding initiatives most important to Governor Kathy Hochul and state legislators—as well as the concerns of labor unions, business leaders, issue advocates and everyday New Yorkers.
BerlinRosen’s public affairs team helped our clients achieve some major victories in this year’s state budget, shaping policies and spending initiatives including a new housing deal, tax credits to help small businesses and local news outlets, investments in mental health and addiction services and a state public campaign finance system.
We’re proud of our work driving narratives to build support among government decision-makers and the public around our clients’ priorities.
Q: Your background is in New York State government. Are there any lessons you learned on the inside that were relevant in this budget cycle?
A: One-house budgets matter. New York’s state constitution gives the governor extraordinary power over the budget process. So much so that pundits and insiders often dismiss the legislature’s “one-house” proposals—the Senate’s and Assembly’s respective responses to the governor’s initial spending plan—as politically motivated wishlists with little impact on the final outcome.
As a former legislative staffer, I take some offense to this notion. It’s also just not true. The governor has enormous leverage over the state budget, but the legislature does ultimately need to vote for any final plan. In addition to serving as direct responses to the governor’s budget ideas, one-house budgets include new ideas that don’t make it into the Executive Budget for one reason or another. Some of these one-house “wishes,” or a version of them, inevitably become a reality.
For instance, BerlinRosen helped launch the Empire State Local News Coalition in February to pass the nation’s first tax credit incentivizing local news outlets to retain and hire journalists. The credit was not included in the governor’s Executive Budget released in January, so we focused our entire earned media and advertising campaign—while the coalition and its lobbyists did the same through their direct engagement—on landing the tax credit in at least one of the legislative one-house budget proposals. The bill was included in the Senate’s one-house response, allowing our campaign to continue building momentum until the historic incentive ultimately passed in the final budget.
Q: Much was made of the budget’s lateness this year. Even though it was technically due on April 1, the budget wasn’t finalized until April 22. Last year’s budget was signed in May. How does a late budget affect the public affairs campaigns you’re working on?
A: Former Governor Andrew Cuomo was famously obsessed with passing on-time budgets (or, when they ran a few days late, “timely” budgets). Advocates and consultants could safely plan for their budget campaigns to end—and their spring break vacations to begin—around April 1, and allocate their resources accordingly.
Governor Hochul has emphasized getting budgets done right over getting them done on time, resulting in fiscal plans routinely passing weeks after the official deadline. This dynamic is undoubtedly painful for already overworked staffers, but it buys our clients more time to get their priorities across the finish line. It also requires public affairs consultants to be more nimble than in the past, striking a delicate balance between executing an aggressive pre-April 1 campaign and holding some tactics and advertising dollars in reserve for a final, post-deadline push.
Q: Is there any advice you’d give to a public affairs consultant running their first New York state budget campaign next year?
A: Go to Albany. Sometimes it feels like there’s no such thing as reliable state budget intel, but it’s especially hard to get a sense of what’s happening in Albany from a Zoom box.
There’s no substitute for being in the capital to chat with the reporters, lobbyists and advocates talking to lawmakers daily. BerlinRosen had teams in Albany staffing client press events and rallies nearly every week during the last two months of the budget process. The on-the-ground insight you receive from these trips keeps your communications efforts fresh—helping you to reverse trends hurting your objectives or insert your client into press narratives that will keep your priority issues on the radar of key decision-makers.
Be there for your client at their Million Dollar Staircase rally, and pop into the Legislative Correspondents Association office and the Capitol’s Dunkin’ while you’re at it.