By Deborah E. Lans
For Capital Region Independent Media
It’s a new year, and state legislators have set their priorities for the coming months.
State Sen. Michelle Hinchey, D-41, represents all of Greene County in the State Senate.
Hinchey said she is proud to see some of the initiatives she has championed in the past included in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed budget for this year. These include funding a Mid-Hudson Valley Transit study to address the lack of public transportation in the district, and support for universal free school meals, including breakfast and lunch.
The state has been increasing school meal funding over time to its current 80% coverage, and the senator thinks now is the time to close the remaining gap. Doing so would allow for expanding Farm to School measures as well – programs that support the sale of locally sourced fresh food to schools by reimbursing their costs. In addition to supporting universal free school meals, Hinchey has introduced a proposal that would enshrine a “right to food,” the freedom to pursue activities that support its production, and a right to be free from hunger in the state’s constitution.
On the housing front, Hinchey is sponsoring a bill to codify programs that support the kinds of affordable housing that are most suitable for rural communities, for example developments with between four and 20 units. While such programs exist, they lack permanence, which Hinchey hopes to achieve.
She also introduced a bill that would increase the training requirements for local planning groups (planning boards and zoning boards of appeal) to include one hour of training for environmentally conscious planning every year. The additional training would cover the goals of the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, funding opportunities, farmland and natural resource conservation, design and materials techniques, and best practices.
In 2024 the Legislature passed, but the governor vetoed, a bill sponsored by Hinchey that would have required hospitals to disclose the services they do not provide, based on “policy-based exclusions,” including such procedures as reproductive and gender-affirming care, thereby exposing service gaps. Hinchey has reintroduced the bill this year (S-1003A).
The “Legislative Findings” in the bill include stark warnings about the trajectory of health care: “The legislature finds that since 2003 more than 40 community hospitals in New York state have closed.
“The legislature additionally finds that as a result of hospital consolidation, large health care systems now control more than 70 percent of acute hospital beds in the state and that these systems sometimes remove categories of care from local hospitals, leaving patients in regions of the state without access to particular types of care, including some types of emergency care.”
The goal of the bill is to require disclosure of the service gaps to aid patients in obtaining needed services.
The senator continues to work for farmland protection, in recognition of the fact that climate changes will set up the Northeast as the nation’s bread basket. Local weather shifts are less extreme here than in California, Florida and the Midwest. To avoid food crises or dependence on foreign food sources, the finite resource of agricultural land must be protected against extreme development pressures for housing, solar farms and other needs, Hinchey said.
Concerning solar siting, she continues to work with state regulators and developers in an effort to increase incentives to siting not on productive farmland but, instead, on such areas as rooftops, closed landfills or brownfields – locations that developers say are currently not cost efficient.
As an affordability and fairness measure, the senator has also re-introduced a bill that would preclude utilities, except as a matter of one-time necessity, from issuing estimated bills rather than bills based on actual usage. The bill was passed by the state Senate unanimously in late January.
