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���������� Note: The Albany Times Union Editorial Board offered the following concerns about proposed expansions in Kendra’s Law that our members and allies have been making since the proposals were first introduced.

“Take, for example, changes to Kendra’s Law to allow mentally ill people to be held in mental health facilities if they lack “significant capacity to provide, and significant judgment to accept, provisions for food, clothing, shelter, or medical care, to the degree that there is a substantial risk of physical harm to self within the reasonably foreseeable future.”
This is a big expansion of a law originally intended to ensure that dangerous people stayed on medication and in treatment.
Advocates for people with mental illnesses see this as an erosion of people’s rights to decide how to live their lives, and a path to more institutionalization.
Would homelessness, for example, now qualify as a reason to take away a person’s right to make personal choices?
Better to make greater investments — as the governor also proposes —in mental health care and supportive housing.”

We continue to strongly urge state legislators to reject expansions to Kendra’s Law!
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Editorial: Don’t Gum Up The Budget
Albany Times Union Editorial Board  April 1, 2022

Gov. Kathy Hochul started out with a mostly good budget. The plan that’s shaping up as the April 1 deadline approaches is another matter.

The executive budget proposed in January was a sensible financial plan — balanced, and free of the kinds of big policy issues and pet projects former Gov. Andrew Cuomo liked to force through amid the budget’s complexity and urgency.

It looked like ���������� might actually be entering an era in which non-budget legislation would be considered one big issue at a time, each measure voted on in the light of day by lawmakers who knew and understood what was in the bills before them.

Instead, the budget features a raft of complex criminal justice reforms and a massive giveaway to the wealthy owners of the Buffalo Bills that grows more troubling the more we learn about it.

We agree with some of the criminal justice reforms, but they still merit more than a deal struck behind closed doors. Take, for example, changes to Kendra’s Law to allow mentally ill people to be held in mental health facilities if they lack “significant capacity to provide, and significant judgment to accept, provisions for food, clothing, shelter, or medical care, to the degree that there is a substantial risk of physical harm to self within the reasonably foreseeable future.” This is a big expansion of a law originally intended to ensure that dangerous people stayed on medication and in treatment.

Advocates for people with mental illnesses see this as an erosion of people’s rights to decide how to live their lives, and a path to more institutionalization. Would homelessness, for example, now qualify as a reason to take away a person’s right to make personal choices? Better to make greater investments — as the governor also proposes —in mental health care and supportive housing.

We’ve endorsed some of Ms. Hochul’s proposals to refine the controversial bail reforms of 2019 — those that add some violent or gun-related crimes to those for which judges have discretion to set higher-than-usual bail, and some objective measures for judges to determine whether defendants could pose a danger if released. We’ve disagreed with giving police greater discretion to arrest people for offenses that normally wouldn’t merit arrest, simply because they’ve been issued an appearance ticket in the previous 18 months. Our positions aside, however, these matters deserve a fuller public debate than being crammed into the budget affords.

As for the Buffalo Bills, we now learn Ms. Hochul wants to help pay for the state’s $600 million share of a new $1.4 billion stadium using $418 million from a just-announced, $564 million payment from the Seneca Nation for overdue gambling revenue.

The Bills deal had no business being sprung on the Legislature and the public just days before the deadline for a budget that’s been under discussion for more than two months. This is the kind of money that’s fought over for things like school aid, social services, and environmental protection, not a stadium that provides few new jobs.

Rather than be rushed into a rushed deal, the Legislature should strip out the stadium and non-budget issues and pass a clean budget. There’s nothing wrong with leaving the governor and lawmakers something to do for the next two and a half months, besides running for reelection.