Nice Try, NY Assembly Member Subversively Tries To Allow Lawmakers to Avoid Utility Bills

NY City’s budget is late. While Mamdani continues to plead for yet another extension, one assembly member decided to submit a bill to help certain state employees avoid worrying about paying their utility bills during a wage freeze.

Assemblywoman Larinda Hooks (D-Queens) is advocating for new legislation, the “Automatic Utility Deferment Act,” that would require energy companies to maintain power for legislators, because they are not receiving their salaries due to the delayed budget.

A memo that accompanied the bill states:

“New York State employs over 130,000 individuals whose compensation depends on timely budget enactment. When budget negotiations extend past the April 1 deadline, affected employees may be unable to meet utility payment obligations during the interruption period.”

Here’s the problem with Hooks’ bill. Currently, only elected officials in state government are being affected because the legislature keeps passing temporary extensions that provide paychecks for the wider workforce.

Translation: The law is intended to apply to all state employees; however, it only affects those who are “subject to a payroll freeze when the state budget is not passed on time.” Interestingly, the only state employees impacted by this payroll freeze are the state lawmakers themselves.

“While state employees receive pay, lawmakers typically have their pay held until the budget is finalized.”

This means that Hooks’ bill would grant lawmakers temporarily deferred utility bills, essentially rewarding them for failing to pass a budget on time.

We can file this carefully worded piece of garbage under “Nice Try.”

Assembly Member John Lemondes also spotted and targeted the bill’s “deceptive” language.

“The language in the bill is purposefully deceptive. They set it up that way,” he told WHAM. “The only ones who aren’t getting paid when the budget is late are the same people who fail to pass it in the first place.”

Republicans criticized Hooks’ bill, rejecting its entire premise.

Assembly Minority Leader Ed Ra (R-Nassau) told reporters on Wednesday, “We don’t need to pass laws to benefit ourselves because we do our, one of our most basic parts of our job, which is passing a budget. It’s kind of a silly conversation to talk about having utility relief that’s only going to be for us.”

The NYS Assembly Republican Conference posted on X

Assembly Member Joseph Angelino told station WBNG.

“This makes us all look bad, and another reason for people to hate politicians when they write laws to take care of themselves. It hit me like a brick that a member of the assembly was basically trying to take care of themselves. I’m an adult. I have a savings account. We all took this job knowing what we were going into, and this is one of the perils of not passing the budget on time.”

Assembly Member Andrea Bailey called the proposal a “slap in the face” to her working-class constituents.

In an interview with WHEC, she said:

“The first thing that came to mind, honestly, is the calls that have come into the office from folks that say, ‘Andrea, I don’t know what I’m going to do — my electric bill doubled, it tripled.’”

“I have been helping small businesses, seniors, single moms, families, farmers, so it’s impacting everybody, and if I were one of those folks looking on the outside looking in, it’s kind of a slap in the face. If we can find a way to carve out and make something a little bit easier for us, I think we should be able to look at ways to make something easier for every resident across New York State.”

Assembly Member Scott Bendett accused Hooks of attempting to enrich herself.

In an interview with station WRGB, he said:

“I find it to be somewhat of a situation that’s very troubling — if I’m a citizen of New York State, I find it very disturbing that a member would put in a bill that would self-enrich themselves.”

“I never try to explain asinine,” state Sen. Andrew Lanza (R-Staten Island) told The Post while still in the chamber’s lobby. “We’re way past timely, and we’re getting close to just inexcusably late.”

According to the bill, the “Automatic Utility Deferment Act,” which has only Hooks as a sponsor, would require utility providers to automatically suspend service terminations and waive late payment fees for state employees subject to a payroll freeze due to a late budget.

For obvious reasons, this proposed self-serving manuscript is not expected to pass. 

Still, incompetence reigns as lawmakers on Wednesday approved the eighth stopgap measure to keep state workers paid. While Democrats, who control all facets of state government, haggle over a full deal behind closed doors.

Many legislators, thinking only of themselves, passed the extender and then hurried out for an early weekend.

New York has not yet hit bottom. Mamdani needs Hochul to support his delusions, but her automatic approval that he imagined is not going to be as robotic as he expected.

Meanwhile, Hooks is writing legislation so she and the other lawmakers can skip paying their electric bills because they didn’t do their jobs.

That’s an interesting concept and demonstrates the thought process that is now prevalent in New York politics. Mamdani sees himself as the king; his court consists of narcissists like Hooks, and the ordinary citizens are nothing more than peasants.

It’s a dangerous time in the “Rotten Apple,” and they did it to themselves. The old proverb that proclaims, “One rotten apple can spoil the whole barrel,” is true, but no one expected them to elect this many.