N.Y.'s budget marathon begins while MTA revenue talks creep up

The payroll mobility tax filled the MTA's coffers once. Will it again?

Good afternoon — it’s Monday and International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

In today’s CapCon:

• Hearings on the state budget kicked off Monday while Hochul and lawmakers ponder a plan to pay for the MTA.

• The state Trooper who said he was shot during a traffic stop in October in Nassau County made the whole thing up, prosecutors said.

• At the Capitol for Tuesday.

• This Week in New York History: Baseball Hall of Fame, the USS Monitor and the first female state paleontologist.

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Senate Finance Chair Liz Krueger (Jim Franco/Times Union)

🗣️ The next phase of N.Y.’s state budget process has begun

The Legislature kicked off the first of 14 hearings on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed $252 billion state budget Monday.

Before we get into that, these are for the insiders:

• The Assembly has released this year’s Yellow Book, which is the analysis of Hochul’s budget by Ways & Means Committee staff.

• The Senate’s version is called the Blue Book. It looks like it’s supposed to be here but that link was broken as of this afternoon.

Back to the budget hearings. They’re led by Senate Finance Chair Liz Krueger and Assembly Ways and Means Chair J. Gary Pretlow. It’s his first year and Krueger’s seventh leading the hearings.

Each of these is an opportunity to learn more about where key members of the Legislature stand on certain issues and how the Hochul administration is thinking of them. They’re also a window into what’s on the minds of lawmakers.

The hearing Monday was for two areas of the budget: Agriculture and Markets, and Parks and Recreation.

And I learned Monday that lawmakers are concerned about something in the farming sector that hadn’t crossed my mind. But if those fears are realized, the state’s economy could face a new challenge.