Legislators shelved measures to cut packaging waste, transition homes off fossil fuels, and ban toxic “forever chemicals” from everyday products. Each measure had passed the Senate, and an Assembly vote was the final hurdle. But most of them never came to a vote.
A fierce blame game has ensued. Since last week, advocates backing those bills have slammed the Assembly and particularly Speaker Carl Heastie, the chamber’s top Democrat, who has the final say over which bills come to a floor vote. Heastie has shot back, accusing his critics of “lazy advocacy” that failed to gain the support needed for their bills. Meanwhile, some assemblymembers have pointed to structural issues in the chamber, which has more members and longer debates than the Senate, but the same tight calendar.
This is hardly the first year that climate groups have faulted the Assembly speaker for holding up climate action. But this year some of the anger is coming from groups that have not criticized the speaker publicly in the past.
“The speaker does not seem to be as environmentally conscious as he should be, and certainly his level of environmental awareness is not reflective of the public support for these issues we work on,” said Adrienne Esposito, executive director of the Long Island–based Citizens Campaign for the Environment. “What we don’t want to do is establish a pattern where the Assembly is where all good environmental bills go to die.”
“I’ve been very consistent in my 11 sessions,” Heastie told New York Focus in an interview Monday. “I do not bring bills to the floor that don’t have enough Assembly Democratic votes, and maybe a little cushion, because to see a bill come to the floor and potentially have some strain in passing — that’s just never something I’ve done.”
“I don’t force members to vote on bills,” he continued. “I’m a consensus builder.”
Easily Passed the Senate
Some of the bills on environmentalists’ roster this year passed the Senate with broad bipartisan support, and advocates expected the same would be true in the Assembly.
Among them was a suite of bills to limit the use of PFAS “forever” chemicals, which have been linked to health issues ranging from reduced immune function to hormone disruption to cancer.
One of the measures would have banned PFAS from beauty products; another from a variety of consumer goods, including cookware; a third would have blocked sewage sludge, which often contains the chemicals, from being spread on farmland; and a fourth would have required certain facilities to step up PFAS testing for water that they discharge into the environment.
Three of the bills passed the Senate by a four-to-one margin, with bipartisan support; the testing bill passed unanimously. Each had Republican support in the Assembly, too. But none reached the Assembly floor.
The only PFAS bill to pass the full legislature this year was one banning the chemicals and other toxic substances in menstrual products. The bill passed the Senate unanimously in January and the Assembly at the end of March, with only one no vote.
Kate Donovan, northeast director of environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council — one of the most prominent environmental groups in the country — said that Assembly leadership showed a “lack of compassion” when it failed to advance the other PFAS bills after they passed the Senate twice in a row.
“Ultimately, the speaker is in control of what comes to the floor,” she said. “Last year, we kind of chalked it up to the congestion pricing debacle [and] inability for the Assembly to manage their time towards the end of session because of a late budget. But I think this year, it became more obvious that we have a more political, structural problem.”
Climate groups, for their part, left Albany this June with just one notable win: a measure requiring building owners, rather than utility customers in general, to cover the cost of connecting new buildings to the gas system. Even that bill represented only a small fraction of what they had hoped to achieve — a sweeping proposal known as the NY HEAT Act, which charted a path off fossil fuels for New York’s millions of existing homes.
The Senate passed the full HEAT Act in 2023 and 2024, and getting the bill to the finish line was a top priority for climate groups this year. In the final days of session, the Senate rushed to pass a compromise measure that was designed specifically to mollify critics in the Assembly. But the Assembly did not take up the full compromise, instead passing only the one key provision — a repeal of the so-called “100-foot rule” — that had been carved out into a backup bill.
Backers of the HEAT Act cheered the final result, which had eluded them for years and achieved at least one of the headline goals of the wider legislation.
The activists who fought for the plastic packaging legislation, meanwhile, are still fuming.
Monique Fitzgerald, a co-founder of the Brookhaven Landfill Action and Remediation Group — a group fighting to close a landfill in a predominantly Black and Latino Long Island town — said it was “shameful” that lawmakers had bought into industry claims about the costs of adopting the law, “instead of listening to community members talking about their real life concerns, their real life health being put at risk.”
She called Heastie’s grip on floor votes “a barrier to democracy.”
“There’s no reason to shield people from accountability with their constituents,” she said. “If they were going to vote no, then let’s see it.”
Heastie, who said he supported the bill, is firing back.
“What legislative body just throws a bill out on the floor and hopes that it gets passed?” he asked New York Focus. “They don’t do it in Congress. They don’t do it in the state Senate. They don’t do it in City Council. And I’m being asked to just throw bills out on the floor and hope they pass?” (Votes do routinely fall short in Congress, though more often on procedural motions and amendments than on full bills.)
How Do You Explain PFAS?
Esposito said she understood Heastie’s reticence with close votes. But the failure of the PFAS legislation, which appeared widely popular in the Assembly, suggested a different problem, she said.
“There’s no reason it didn’t come to the floor, except the speaker prevented it from coming to the floor,” she argued. “Environmental bills … get left to the last day, and then the Assembly claims to run out of time, when, if the bills had been a priority in the first place, they would have passed.”
Esposito said she could see only one good explanation for the Assembly’s limited progress on environmental issues this year: the historic sums that business interests spent lobbying against the legislation, in particular the packaging bill.
“It’s a classic case of the corporate interests being given a higher value by elected officials than the public interest,” she said. “And that is a pretty tragic statement.”
Within the chamber, reactions have been more mixed.
Assemblymember Phara Souffrant Forrest, a strong supporter of the plastic packaging bill, argued that Heastie and his team are very effective at whipping votes when they choose to.
“Literally, a vote is on the floor, I have put down ‘no,’ and then they call you into the office and basically strong-arm you into putting a yes on that board,” she said. “They didn’t do that in this case.” (Heastie said he only whips votes for the budget, which the state is constitutionally mandated to pass.)
Other champions of the plastics bill were less quick to blame Heastie for its failure.
“I think my frustration is broader,” said Assemblymember Deborah Glick, the bill’s sponsor. She said that some of her colleagues told her they would vote for her bill, but appear to have told Heastie’s team otherwise: “I certainly think that members need to be honest with each other.”
Moreover, she said, “it is a major disappointment that so many people were susceptible to corporate misinformation.”
Time Constraints
Assemblymembers also highlighted structural differences between their chamber and the Senate. For the last 15 years, the Senate has consistently passed hundreds more bills than the Assembly; this year, 1743 passed the upper house, compared to 995 in the “People’s House” — one of the biggest gaps in recent history, according to a review by the advocacy group NYPIRG.
Among the reasons why: The Assembly is more than three times the size of the Senate, and members bring a more diverse range of priorities. Debates often last longer in the chamber, with Republicans sometimes pushing debates up to the four-hour limit — as they threatened to do with the packaging bill.
“That means that if the Republicans want to debate three bills in a day, that’s 12 hours, if they want to debate the full time,” said Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha. “And we had long debates on so many bills that are not worth long debates at this point. … So this sense of time being against us is real.”
Heastie blamed those time constraints for the failure of the PFAS legislation, among others.
The crunch was particularly severe this year, after state leaders finalized the state budget more than five weeks past the deadline.
One assemblymember, who requested anonymity to discuss the chamber’s internal workings, noted that the legislature rarely takes up controversial bills while the budget is still being negotiated, in part because of staffing constraints. The Assembly’s central staff work hard to prepare members for debates, but generally can’t while they’re still tied up with the budget, the lawmaker said. That leaves all the big-ticket, non-budget items to the final weeks of session.
Shrestha said that the demands of the electoral calendar are also a factor in blocking important bills. Albany’s two-year terms require lawmakers to juggle campaigning with legislating for the bulk of their time in office, she said, “and that is really bad for democracy.”
“A lot of decisions that politicians make come from fear of losing their election, which … is obviously very self-destructive for the mandates that we are responsible for,” Shrestha said.
Shrestha noted that climate and environmental bills can be especially challenging to pass, because lawmakers are often less familiar with them than they are with other issues, giving industry lobbyists a greater opportunity to shape the debate. And there were added hurdles this year, with Albany scrambling to respond to the chaos coming from Washington as well as to a crisis in state prisons.
Should Have Been Banner Year
For many in the climate and environmental world, President Donald Trump’s onslaught of cuts and policy rollbacks have only made it more urgent for New York to lead.
“This should have been a breakthrough year for environmental action in New York,” said Vanessa Fajans-Turner, executive director of Environmental Advocates NY, in a statement last week. “The Senate did its part… But the Assembly? Once again, it left the job unfinished,” she continued, calling the end result a “dereliction of duty.”
Heastie bristles at the sentiment.
“Look at everything that we have done,” he said, pointing to the state’s 2019 climate law, the 2022 Environmental Bond Act, the Build Public Renewables Act, funding for electric buses, and last year’s Climate Superfund. “People can’t just say, if we didn’t do what they want this year — you can’t erase everything else that we’ve done.”
This article was published by New York Focus. Read the original here.
