End of session: 8 big bills that passed both chambers

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In today’s CapCon:

If you spent time at the state Capitol this week, you might have noticed a certain energy in the air.

Lobbyists and their clients scrambled to track and respond to a rapidly evolving legislative landscape that saw the same amount of movement over the course of four days that would usually be seen over four weeks.

The culprit, as you already know if you’re a regular reader, was this year’s state budget process, which didn’t conclude until last week. Lawmakers typically have about a month after the budget concludes to consider other matters.

“The budget dominated a good part of the session,” Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie said this week. “It did strain the Legislature’s ability to legislate.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose policy priorities were the cause of that pause, has pushed back on that argument, saying lawmakers could have been approving standalone bills while budget negotiations were underway.

Both chambers had gaveled in and approved bills during that time but many were one-house bills that weren’t moving in the other chamber. The final week of session is when lawmakers came together to move bills through both chambers.

“That going on until the better part of May was very difficult,” Stewart-Cousins. “(It was) obviously important that we had to resolve it but it did impact our scheduling.”

That scheduling, however, did not prevent lawmakers from approving an extraordinary amount of bills in the final days of session.

The state Senate approved 724 bills this week alone before lawmakers in that chamber gaveled out for the year. That was nearly half of the 1,621 bills approved by the chamber since the start of this year’s session in January.

The state Assembly had passed 254 bills this week as of the start of their final day of session Friday. They haven’t finished just yet but are expected to gavel out Friday night.

That’s all to say that it’s been an incredibly busy week at the state Capitol full of surprises and activity on bills that, until the last few days, had an unclear fate among lawmakers. Many of them have flown under the radar.

Here’s a wrap-up of eight such bills that passed in the final days of session, including significant measures that weren’t seriously considered until this week.

I’ll continue to tell you about legislation that was approved by both chambers next week, including new measures aimed at tightening utility rate oversight, making changes related to financial services and creating new worker protections.

1. The Health Information Privacy Act (S9269/A10357)

This was the most-lobbied bill of last year’s legislative session outside of the state budget, according to the state Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government.

It would create new privacy rules around how someone’s personal health data can be used by private companies. It’s intended to create a data privacy shield for health information not already protected by federal law under HIPAA.

It was approved by Democrats in the state Legislature last year but was vetoed by Hochul, who said “the bill’s definitions and scope are broad, creating potentially significant uncertainty” about how it would be applied.