Good morning. Today is Tuesday. Governor Kathy Hochul will deliver the State address today. We’ll get a preview of his billion-dollar plan to tackle health care shortfalls for people with mental illness. We’ll also look at the problems with the nurse strikes at two New York City hospitals.
Credit… Cindy Schultz for The New York Times
What will the governor say?
It doesn’t matter who’s governor, that question is always there in Albany on the day of the State speech. Today is the day.
Some longtime observers of Albany say that even for governors like Hochul, who has been in office for a relatively short time, State of the State speeches have a formula. It’s been 504 days since Andrew Cuomo replaced him. That’s just a fraction of the more than 7,500 days the state’s longest-serving governor, George Clinton, spent between 1777 and 1804, a six-year gap from 1795 to 1801.
Longtime followers of Albany say that State of the Union often follows a time-tested formula. Most of the years, Blair Horner, executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, said, “Most of the speeches are largely self-congratulatory to the governor and lawmakers. I want The Buffalo News to write about something in Buffalo or The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.” There is usually a section with interesting regional implications as a way of getting the spy to write about something in Rochester.
He also said the conversations “usually lacked details and bad news didn’t come out until the budget” and that would be announced in a few weeks. “The MTA’s crater funding probably won’t get much mention,” he said, citing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the government agency that operates the Long Island Railroad as well as subways and buses in New York City. Metro-Northern Railroad.
What to Listen to
In his New Year’s Day inaugural address, Hochul stated that public safety and affordability of housing will be the two most important issues as he tries to address the wave of discontent that brought him closer to 6½ percentage points, beating Republican rival Lee Zeldin in November. .
Democrats in Albany, who have veto-proof majorities in the House and State Senate, will listen for clues that Hochul, a moderate, is open to policy concessions to progressives. It is not yet clear whether the state, which progressives may oppose, will seek changes to its bail laws.
Another question is whether he’ll be talking about the fight to nominate Hector LaSalle as the state’s chief judge. At least a dozen state senators have already said they will vote against his approval.
Part of his speech will focus on an ambitious billion-dollar plan to close some of the many gaps in the healthcare system for New Yorkers with mental illness.
Forcing private hospitals to reopen more than 800 inpatient psychiatric beds; creation of 3,500 service-supported residences; and expanding mental health services in schools, which have seen large increases in children with psychological problems. His plan would expand insurance coverage for mental health services, including the treatment of school-aged children.
It will also urge hospitals to adhere to stricter standards for assessing and admitting patients with serious mental illness. And his plan was to create more teams of outpatient care coordinators so these patients don’t fall through the cracks.
It will seek to triple the capacity of outpatient community behavior centers from 68,000 to 188,000 patients to help people with moderate mental illness such as depression who may have trouble accessing care. About 19 new sites will be built in New York and 11 in other parts of the state.
Joy Rudin, CEO of the nonprofit Institute for Community Living, which provides services and housing to people with serious mental illness, said Hochul’s coordinated approach is “the best prescription a doctor can write.” He described Hochul’s plan as “transformational”.
Various elements of the governor’s plan are among the items Mayor Eric Adams requested in November when he announced his policy of assisting people with serious, untreated mental illness by force if necessary. Adams said the state is asking hospitals to consider patients’ long-term histories and their ability to adhere to outpatient care when deciding how much to keep them. It also called for better coordination between hospitals and community caregivers.
Weather forecast
Enjoy a mostly sunny day in your mid-40s. Partly cloudy in the evening, the temperature is in the 30s at the lowest.
PARKING ON THE ALTERNATIVE SIDE
Effective until Monday (Martin Luther King’s Birthday).
Latest Metro news
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Hamlin goes home: Buffalo Bills security guard Damar Hamlin, who collapsed on the field during a game, has been discharged from intensive care at Cincinnati hospital and returned to Buffalo.
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Parts of the gun law blocked: A federal judge has undermined the state’s effort to create gun-free zones in public places where crowds gather, by ruling that a central component of a new law in New Jersey that limits where handguns can be carried is unconstitutional.
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The death of a Filipino food pioneer: King Phojanakong, who in the 2000s took the responsibility of bringing Filipino cuisine into the mainstream of American cuisine with his first restaurant, the Kuma Inn, died in Manhattan.
Crime
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GoFundMe scam: A woman has been sentenced to three years in a New Jersey state prison for her involvement in a scheme that raised more than $400,000 from a misleading GoFundMe campaign for a homeless man.
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Group member arrested: Cage the Elephant lead singer Matt Shultz was arrested on gun charges after he was seen pulling a gun out of his pocket in a public restroom at a Manhattan hotel.
Nurses strike at 2 hospitals
More than 7,000 nurses went on strike at two New York City hospitals – Mount Sinai Hospital and Montefiore Medical Center. They demand higher wages and better working conditions.
Nurses at eight other private city hospitals agreed to temporary contracts and did not quit.
Seeing how valuable they were when the coronavirus pandemic broke out in 2020 and struggling with exhaustion and exhaustion, some nurses on the strike line in Mount Sinai said they wanted better conditions for themselves and their patients.
Lorena Vivas, who has been a nurse at Mount Sinai for 19 years, said she was tasked with caring for three or four patients at a time, rather than one or two patients who had to care for the intensive care unit. “This was going on even before the epidemic,” she added, “and the epidemic turned everything upside down.”
Lookout Montefiore nurses described overcrowding and understaffed conditions. The union said patients in Montefiore were held in the corridors so often that the administration installed televisions there.
Hospital officials said they were doing what they could, given the national nurse shortage. A spokesperson for Mount Sinai said the hospital has pursued “unprecedented recruitment strategies” in recent years.
When it became clear that a strike was likely this week, Mount Sinai and Montefiore rushed to bring in temporary staff, even putting doctors on service to fill nursing vacancies. Montefiore said Monday that union leaders “decided to move away from their patients’ bedside” despite a bid for a 19.1 percent compound pay increase over three years and a promise to create more than 170 new nursing positions.
METROPOLITAN diary
rude awakening
Dear Diary:
I was born and raised in New York. I attended my first Broadway show when I was still in the womb (“Fiddler on the Dam”, starring Zero Mostel.) I saw my first movie at Radio City Music Hall (“Bedknobs and Broomsticks”).
There are 8-millimeter footage of me staggering through the Central Park children’s zoo, and photos of my youth atop the Twin Towers. I knew which deli had the best corned rye and where to find the best dim sum in Chinatown.
I loved everything about growing up in New York: the clatter of wooden escalators at Macy’s; The jingle of a coin falling on the subway turnstile.
I got my working papers from the State Department of Labor when I was 15; At the age of 23, I got a marriage license from the municipality.
I moved in my mid-20s but visited as often as I could. Once, while waiting to cross 42nd Street on Fifth Avenue, I found myself gazing at and admiring the Fine Art architecture of the main branch of the New York Public Library.
Unaware that the light had changed, I felt someone hurry past me.
“Tourist,” he said.
— Stacy Reich
Drawn by Agnes Lee. Submit applications here and Read the rest of the Metropolitan Diary here .
I’m glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
PS Here is today’s Short Puzzle and Spelling Contest . You can find all our puzzles here. .
Melissa Guerrero, Ed Shanahan, Luis Ferré-Sadurni, Andy Newman, and Sharon Otterman contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com.
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