Full Episode: End of the 2023 Legislative Session, NY's Olympic Investment, Poem Renovation

Full transcript of End of the 2023 Legislative Session, Poem Renovation

Dan Clark: This week was the last scheduled week of this year's legislative session in Albany. That means unless they come back for a special session later this year, the state legislature is officially done until January, but that doesn't mean it was a slow week. 

In their final days, lawmakers appear to strike a deal on the clean slate act and as we predicted last week, the bill has changed in the meantime. It would allow criminal convictions to be automatically sealed after a waiting period if someone has served their entire sentence, including probation, and has remained crime free.

For misdemeanors, you'd have to wait three years after the end of your sentence for the conviction to be sealed. For felonies, it would be eight years and class a felonies and sex offenses would not be eligible. Conviction records would still be available to certain people like, law enforcement, court officials, gun licensing agencies, and others who would still have access, but most prospective employers and landlords would not. Meaning people wouldn't be denied housing or a job because of a past conviction. 

That's the whole purpose of the bill, according to its sponsor, Brooklyn Senator Zellnor Myrie.

Zellnor Myrie: This is going to open doors and there's nothing better than that. There is nothing better than giving someone opportunity, and these are individuals that have served their time. We have said if you do the crime, you should serve the time. They have served the time and they have come back out, and we have told them, actually, we want you to serve more time. We want you to be punished in perpetuity. It's not right.

DC: As of Friday morning, that bill still hadn't passed, and we don't know for sure if it will. We tape on Friday mornings and lawmakers still have today to vote. It would take a majority of Democrats in both chambers to get it passed. Republicans are against the bill, claiming it could impact public safety. Assembly Member Michael Tannousis is a republican from Staten Island and a former prosecutor.

Michael Tannousis: People that are hiring workers have a right to know who they're hiring and their background. People that rent apartments or houses have a right to know who they're putting in their house. This law is completely irresponsible.

DC: There was a lot more up in the air as the week dragged on… literally.

The air quality throughout New York became dangerous at times this week because of Canadian wildfires burning to our North. On Wednesday, New York City and Rochester were right in the path of the smoke and for environmentalists, that was also an opportunity. They urged the legislature to pass three bills by the week's end to combat climate change which experts say contribute to fires like these.

The first bill would require fossil fuel companies to pay for future climate projects. The second would require companies to reduce their packages by 50% over the next 12 years. Business groups are against that one saying it would be an expensive transition, and the third bill would cap utility costs for low and middle-income New Yorkers. Judith Enck is a former EPA official who now leads the environmental group, Beyond Plastics.

Judith Enck: This cannot be business as usual. Look out the window, Carl Heastie, and Andrea Stewart-Cousins. Look at what the climate crisis is doing, horrific air quality. Legislators still in Albany, they can do something. Are they going to issue a press release? Are they actually going to take action to protect our health?

Dc: As of Friday morning, none of those bills looked likely to pass. Let's start there with this week's panel. Rebecca Lewis is from City and State New York, Josh Solomon is from the Times Union. Thank you both for being here. 

I want to start with the housing deal that we now know fell apart kind of in the final days of session. So, I have a printout of the statement from the legislative leaders they basically told everybody that they had a deal between the Senate and the Assembly, that included things like housing vouchers, extension of 421-a, which we talked a little bit on the show, good cause eviction, and a bunch of other stuff.

Rebecca, you've been watching this. What do you think happened here? I mean, they blame it on the Governor not wanting to go along with their package, but this is something they've been working on for presumably five months.

Rebecca Lewis: Well, that's a lot of presumption. They didn't form a working group until about a week before the end of session so hard to say.

It depends on who you ask. I have sources in the legislature who will say conflicting things, who will say, yes, we have the votes on, in particular, good cause eviction, a version of it. That is easily the most controversial part of that housing package, sources who say, well, my understanding was we didn't quite have a deal but we were, you know, close to it and we were getting the votes and then others who said, no, we absolutely had a deal, we had the votes and the Governor killed it.

So either way, placing the blame on the Governor, at the very least, takes the pressure off of the legislative leaders, although we are still seeing plenty of housing and tenant advocates place the blame on legislative leaders and it's their job to pass bills and not worry about whether or not the Governor is going to veto them.

DC: Right, the governor’s Communications Director had responded to the statement saying, if you had a deal, why didn't you pass it? Because that's how government works. They pass the bills, like you said, she can decide if she wants to veto it or sign it.

I think that everybody likes to get a three-way deal so you don't have the embarrassing moment of a veto. I think that's what they're trying to go for. I'm interested to see if they do anything between now and the next session.

Josh, what do you think?

Josh Solomon: Well, the big piece here is that good cause eviction is really wanted by progressives in the city. Those progressives, or those lawmakers maybe they're not like DSA progressives, are the ones who are likely to be challenged in the primary, and the housing advocates are the ones who are likely to run a candidate against them. So, they need to at least say we did everything we could to try to pass this, it's their fault. 

Whether it's the leader, whether it's the Governor. It's useful for them to say, we could have done it but couldn't. Whether they could have or couldn't, we'll never know because they didn't vote on the floor, and they didn't even introduce the bills, as Julie Wood, the communications director pointed out. 

But it is useful for them to shift blame and it's useful for the Governor to push it back and say, hey, show me the bills.

DC: Right, so both sides can kind of look like we were working on this and nobody else came to the table, I guess.

It's interesting when you look at Albany politics from that lens because I saw their statement yesterday at the legislative leaders statement yesterday as kind of one of their stronger moments of standing up to Governor Hochul, which they've had a relatively good working relationship with aside from her nominee for Chief Judge this year and her Lieutenant Governor from last year and a few other things. So, I guess I’m just wondering how that affects things going forward.

Rebecca, do you think this widens the divide between the Governor and the legislature, or is that fake?

RL: I actually disagree with you in the sense of the statement being strongly coming against the governor. I view it as admitting defeat, because if they really wanted to come out strong against the governor, they would have passed it and forced her to veto the bill.

Now maybe they genuinely didn't have the votes, and this was the best compromise. It looks better for them, certainly, to say, well, we tried to come to a three-way deal. We are cooperative, collaborative government and we're not going to pass something that we know is going to get vetoed, but the way i see it is if they’re almost saving face with the Governor, where if they had introduced a bill, they had the votes and they passed it, even if they didn't have the supermajority to override the veto, it would have allowed them to say, we did literally everything we could to get housing done, not just good cause eviction, all sorts of housing proposals to address the housing crisis in this state and then they could say, but the Governor refused to sign it.

The fact that they're not forcing her to be in that position is, you know, as you said, Julie Wood, her spokesperson, put out a statement saying, well, you didn't give us a bill. You know, both sides are able to point to something here. So it's almost a mutually assured destruction.

DC: It’s a really good point, too. As i have the list of the stuff that was in the package, a point that i think is important is that this was kind of an omnibus bill and they could have well taken stuff out of this bill and passed separate legislation instead of trying to package everything together, which I’m assuming killed it, but you know, we'll never know what happens behind closed doors in that building.

I want to turn to clean slate. We're taping on Friday morning and clean slate hasn't passed yet i find myself really hesitant to say it's going to pass because for the past two years before this, this has been almost the exact same situation where in the last week, clean slate gains a lot of momentum especially two years ago they were basically saying it was going to pass again. This time, it actually seems real.

Josh, you've been covering clean slate and criminal justice reform pretty closely. Why do you think that this came together this year?

JS: There's a desire to finally get it through. You're also not in an election this year like you were in 2021. So you have momentum, you have tweaks to the bill, you have changes that the business community wanted that remove some liability from them. You have changes to serious class a felonies that will be excluded. So, they've kind of carved out a lot, and then you have this year where if you're not going to pass it this year, you're not going to pass it in 2024. 

So, it creates like a fertile situation where they can say we can move forward with this. Nonetheless, there's still a little bit of like anxiety in the air. Like, will it pass, will it not pass, but it seems pretty solid. I think the only reason that there isn't that confidence is the Governor hasn't said, this is great. We're done.

DC: I think Rebecca, you asked her on Wednesday about this whole thing about clean slate coming together and you really pushed her on what is her position on this bill, and she repeatedly did not give her position on the bill to you. 

You were asking kind of what specifically would you like to see in a final agreement and she wouldn't say it. Do you think that this coming together is a sign of a shifting legislature at all politically?

RL: You know, it's hard to say. On one hand, I have been hearing that there's a lot of confusion about why the governor's saying this and doing this because she's saying different things to different people. Depending on who you are talking to there is certainly confusion.

There's been a sense that there was a coming to the table that there was a working with her to get this done, and then just not really understanding what exactly it is that she is asking for, especially because she had her own proposal last year that was significantly different. 

Now you have to be reading it very closely to kind of understand the nuances, but proposal added far more time in practice to the amount of time would you have to get a record sealed, and that's one thing that, for the most part, has remained the same in the legislative version. The only thing that changed was it went from seven years to eight years post-release if you stay out of trouble. It did not incorporate Hochul’s version of calculating what exactly does eight years mean. So the various changes, were made for hesitant assembly members where the bill has died in the past, some of it was made for concerns as Josh said for business leaders and just generally, you know, concerns about, well, will this apply to a murderer, but not the main difference between the Governor and the legislature based on her proposal from last year and the fact that she won't say specifically what it is that still caused the holdup because she called this conceptual. 

It doesn't really leave much to go off of other than what she said last year and what she said last year, there's still a difference between that and what we have now.

DC: Well, we will see how it shakes out later today. Maybe I won't. I don't think I’m going to go to the capitol. So good luck to both of you. 

Rebecca Lewis from City and State New York, Josh Solomon from the Times Union, thank you both.

We'll have more on the end of session next week. 

Dan Clark: Turning now to the North Country. It's been more than 40 years since the winter Olympics were held in Lake Placid in the Adirondacks. That was in 1980, but if you visit Lake Placid today, you'll find that the sites of those Olympics are still surprisingly active, and that's thanks in a large part to the state. 

That's according to a new story from NPR’s Brian Mann in the magazine, Adirondack Life that shows more than half a billion dollars in-state spending on the Olympic sites over the last six years alone. Brian joined us this week with more on that story.

Brian, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it.

Brian Mann: Thanks for having me on.

DC: Of course. So, we're talking about a little more than half a billion dollars invested in the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA) up there in Lake Placid over the last six years. It's a lot of money. I think anybody can recognize that. What has it been going toward, I guess, that would be my first question?

BM: I think the thing that shocked us when we began investigating because that was the number that got our attention is that it actually is a lot more money than that. It's already up around $700 million that's been spent on the Olympics authority, and it's gone to refurbish and to expand and improve winter sports and tourism venues mostly around Lake Placid, this village of about 2,300 people but also in the Johnsburg area of the Adirondacks and Belleayre in the Catskills, the ski area there, and the vision is that this will revitalize and kind of create a golden age for winter sports and tourism in the North Country, but what we found is that the price tag is just incredibly high. The ORDA officials themselves describe this taxpayer spending as unprecedented.

DC: So, do we know what changed there? You report in the story how there was a major uptick in spending toward ORDA up there, do we know what changed in the last six years before that to make the state start investing?

BM: It's really a shocking and kind of tectonic shift. 

What we saw for years was Albany officials complaining to ORDA when they would lose five or $10 million. That would be described as red ink. So about six years ago, the current CEO of ORDA, Mike Pratt, went to Albany with other boosters of the Olympic vision, and they convinced the Hochul administration to flip that narrative. 

We're not going to talk about losses of $5 million, let's talk about investments of a hundred, $150 million. What we find is they are now on track over the next couple of years to spend a billion dollars, and what Albany officials say is, look, we think this will create economic activity. It will attract tourists. It will be a really big boon to the North Country and also the Catskills.

What we found were some real questions about the management and the planning to make that huge investment actually pay off.

DC: Talk to me about that part. What were those questions that you found? What did you see?

BM: Well, ORDA has always had a very troubled financial history. Just before this surge of spending began, the comptroller issued a report slamming the organization for having poor planning, poor accounting procedures. It was really a deep dive on the organization's accounting and it was not pretty. 

What we found were really significant questions about whether real reforms have been made. Despite this vast surge of money, it was often difficult to find out exactly where the money would be going.

In many years, including the last couple of years, ORDA has been given huge amounts of money, more than $100 million by Albany without any really specific list of what that money would be spent on and what we just saw this last winter with the World University Games. This was the biggest winter sports event in the upstate New York in a generation, state officials spent more than half a billion dollars preparing for it. $552 million by their accounting, and what we found is that it generated only about $700,000 in actual ticket sales, and none of that money went to ORDA, and ORDA officials just couldn't really account for why they had made those decisions, why attendance was relatively poor and then why the dollars didn't come back to the state organization that really fostered the event.

DC: You know, given all that, it sounds like in the long term, we don't really know how this spending is going to impact ORDA and the region. Do people say it's at least paying off in the short term as we see these large sums of money flow into it?

BM: Look, if you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on small mountain villages, there's going to be an economic impact. There are many people who we spoke to say who say ORDA is an essential organization.

Now that the scale of spending is literally ten-fold what it used to be, what we wanted to ask is exactly that question: is there planning for how this is going to work long term? We really couldn't find that plan. ORDA officials believe they are a bigger and bigger economic engine for upstate New York. We found questions about that that clearly revenues are up, crowds are bigger, but at the same time, expenses to taxpayers also appear to be on the rise.

DC: All right, NPR's Brian Mann, great reporting. Thank you so much.

BM: Thanks for having me on.

DC: Another factor impacting all of this is climate change and how ORDA will cope with it.

You can read the full story here.

Dan Clark: Turning now to education in New York. Poem Renovation is a free website where you can take words from a poem, mix them up and rearrange them to make a new poem. The artist who created the site says it's designed for self-expression, and now she's brought that concept into the classroom.

In this story, from producer Catherine Rafferty, we see a different side of poetry at a local school district. 

Kelly de la Rocha:But gods are born of ichor and nectar. Their excellence is already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar, destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters, all that smoke and savor rising so delicately.

The way I got the idea for Poem Renovation is that I’ve been writing poetry since I was 17 years old. It was when my parents were getting divorced, it was a time in my life that was really confusing for me. I was hurting. I didn't understand what was going on and I turned to poetry and I started writing poetry to help me figure out my life, and it worked. 

Back then, I wrote a lot of self-portrait poems and I kept those all these years and I started looking back during the pandemic at those poems and saying, well, these don't really define me as I am now, and I started wondering about what could I do with those poems to rearrange them and make them describe me now. 

So, I took some magnetic paper and I printed those poem out on magnetic paper, cut them all up, stuck them on my refrigerator and I started moving the words around. And that made me start thinking about how could I share this idea of kind of recycling old written things to make something new and share it with the public.

Basically, every day on this site, users are presented with between 30 and 40 words from a song, a poem, a snippet of literature, and when you open up the site, you'll be presented with a word bank where all of the words are scrambled up together, and you can click on the words, whatever ones resonate with you, close the word bank and then you have a digital canvass where those words will appear and you can move them around and do what you'd like with them. You can also share your creations and see what the original excerpt is.

I started to hear from people who were saying this would be great in a classroom. I think this would be great with my students, I teach creative writing, I teach English, I think the students could really benefit from this. It was something that I hadn't even thought of before, and my sister-in-law, Dena Marie, teaches at Shenendehowa Gowana middle school, and she's a sixth-grade teacher, and she was one of the early ones this said, I want this in my classroom.

Dena Marie de la Rocha: The students love that poem renovation provides them with a different passage every day. They also love that they can use it on their screen. They love to be on paper, but they also love that they have this. I think they kind of look at it as a game which is really fun for them and they're not intimidated by it. They literally don't feel that they're pressured to do anything a certain way, so I think they get excited to jump on.

Student 1: Poetry wasn't the thing I liked because, like, it was all about, like, our teacher didn't like, mention like you didn't have to rhyme all the time, and then she also like didn't-- there was like nothing like Poem Renovation. I couldn't really understand poems back then, but now I really understand because of Poem Renovation. 

Monsters starting plagues, fingertips destroying nectar. Smoke bursting from cities. Gods rising. Reading their fame. Savor what they already find. All excellences are born.

DMR: The skills that my students learn using poem renovation is that poetry has-- it's limitless. It has no rules. It doesn't have to be a certain way. It doesn't have to show a certain emotion. It doesn't have to be written exactly the same way from day to day as well. Poetry is an expression of how they feel. They also learn elements of poetry like using similes and metaphors and different sound devices and visually what poetry is like on the screen or on the page. So it's an easy way for them to self-express.

We actually had some really great successes at the beginning with students that were much more shy and intimidated. Didn't really want to talk or share within their small group setting or the large group setting and are excited to share what they come up with on the screen with the poem reno.

Student 2: Hi. I'm Kyla and this is my poem.

Smoke rising. Starting fame. Gods rise. Monsters destroying cities. Wars delicately bursting.

Student 3: Hi, my name is Dylan White. I'm here to share my poem.

Smoke that's rising. Breeding monsters and excellences. Already bursting, savor nectar.

Student 4: Hello. My name is Alex and this is my poem. 

Smoke rising, bursting, destroying, but there are plagues starting already from fame and excellences.

KR: there are social-emotional benefits as well. It's an opportunity to receive positive feedback from your peers after you create something and share it with the class. It's an opportunity to talk about perspective, you know, we all start with the same words but we all come up with something different. We all have our own voice and our own perspective. It's an activity that helps kids to focus. It's a doorway to new possibilities. 

A lot of times what I think of when I think about the words that are in the excerpts every day, I think of them like pretty stones that you can look at, and they can be whatever you want them to be, and that's been really cool for me is coming up with a way that I can help kids to appreciate language, to love words and to also understand the power of them, how you he no, you switch a couple of those words around and they mean something completely different.

If you want to give Poem Renovation a try yourself, click this link.

Catch this week's show on your local PBS member station, or watch on YouTube, Facebook, or using the free PBS app anytime after Friday.

On This Week's Edition of New York NOW:

• It was the last scheduled week of this year's legislative session at the State Capitol in Albany. We'll tell you what happened.
• Josh Solomon from the Times Union and Rebecca Lewis from City & State NY have more analysis and news from the week.
• New York has invested more than half a billion dollars into the Olympics Regional Development Authority over the last six years alone. NPR's Brian Mann reports on how that money's been spent, and how that's impacted the region. (Read that story here.)
• Poem Renovation challenges users to express themselves by creating a new poem, with parts of an old one. Now, one teacher in New York has brought the concept into the classroom. Producer Catherine Rafferty has that story.