Cutting Red Tape: Governor Hochul Unveils Second Wave of Regulatory Reforms Under ‘Express NY’ Initiative

Governor Kathy Hochul today announced the second wave of state regulatory reform actions through her EXPRESS NY initiative to make government work better for New Yorkers. The 75 regulatory reform actions across 17 state agencies build on the first wave of 50 reforms announced in June. To date, EXPRESS NY has advanced more than 120 actions spanning more than 20 state agencies and authorities. The reforms will save New Yorkers tens of millions of dollars and an estimated 5 million hours in time previously wasted filling out unnecessary paperwork, waiting in line, navigating confusing instructions and websites. More than 2.5 million New Yorkers are expected to benefit from these actions.

"Last year, I set out to find ways to make government work better and help New Yorkers access the essential services they need. Today, as we advance another 75 regulatory reforms to cut red tape and save New Yorkers time and money, we make real progress towards delivering on the promise of a government that works for New Yorkers, not against them," Governor Hochul said. "These steps will increase access to vital services for families, students and patients, help small businesses get ahead, and cut down on burdensome red tape that wastes people's time. This is the most ambitious effort to modernize government in state history, and our work is only getting started to deliver for New Yorkers."

Last fall, the Governor launched this initiative by issuing a call for recommendations across all state agencies. Each state agency was asked to recommend regulations or rules that could be eliminated or modified to improve the delivery of government services. In June, the first 50 actions were generated from that list following months of coordinated review and assessment across government.

In addition, Governor Hochul put out a call for New Yorkers across the state to submit their own regulatory reform ideas earlier this year. The state's EXPRESS NY portal received an overwhelming response, with nearly 4,000 proposals from all 62 of New York's Counties. Several New Yorkers' submissions from the EXPRESS NY portal directly inform actions taken in this second wave of regulatory reforms announced today.

This latest wave of regulatory reforms will help bring down housing costs, increase access to child care, and help small businesses thrive. The 75 regulatory reform actions are focused across four primary areas:

Expanding Access To Child Care, Health Care, And Mental Health Services

• Expanding the supply of child care educators by broadening the list of eligible fields of study, creating new career pathways in early childhood education. This will expand the qualified applicant pool and create new career pathways in early childhood education.
• Making it easier to operate child care in school buildings by aligning facility requirements between the Office of Children and Family Services and the State Education Department for school-aged children who are receiving child care in school buildings. This will allow providers to operate in school buildings without costly renovations, while maintaining strong safety and quality standards.
• Reducing administrative delays around often duplicative background checks for child care educators, allowing providers to prevent closures due to staff absences while maintaining critical safeguards, including state-required staff-to-child ratios and appropriate supervision.
• Broadening pathways for child care educators to grow their careers by allowing for extensive work experience to count towards becoming a child care director, creating career mobility for more educators in programs across the state.
• Providing flexibility for child care directors to serve multiple sites by allowing child care directors at day care centers to work across two sites, giving providers increased flexibility without sacrificing program quality and safety standards.
• Speeding up certification for mental health services by updating the Office of Mental Health's Prior Approval Review (PAR) process, which has not changed in over fifteen years, allowing up to 1,700 programs to benefit. Changes will allow new mental health services to come online more quickly, expanding treatment for New Yorkers, by providing flexibility to reclassify a project to a lower or higher level of review based on factors like the impact on the local community, complexity, or expenditure of resources
• Allowing nursing homes to focus on serving residents, by reducing reporting frequenciesof nursing home bed census reporting from weekly to monthly. This will lighten the administrative burden for 598 nursing homes while preserving key oversight metrics.
• Streamlining home care agency reporting by eliminating a redundant reporting requirement for licensed Home Care Service Agencies, through integrating relevant data into their annual registration process. This will eliminate duplicate paperwork for approximately 1,200 home care providers and allow administrators to spend more time on patient-care and services.
• Increasing support to young adults in foster care by allowing virtual caseworker visits, provided they give informed consent. This provides greater flexibility for young adults (18 or older) as they transition into independence.

Saving Students and Families Time And Money

• Modernizing community college residency rules by eliminating steep tuition penalties for in-state students who miss the filing deadline. Prior to this change, students could face more than $5,000 in penalties. Additionally, this reform will cut administrative red tape for families and expand affordable access to college credits.
• Allowing colleges to waive tuition liability when students face emergencies so that students facing health, family, or other unforeseen emergencies in the second half of an academic term are no longer required to pay for their tuition if they were unable to complete their studies in a given semester. This will also discourage mid-semester disenrollment, helping students stay on track toward degree completion while boosting overall college retention.
• Safeguarding affordable housing in rural communities by modernizing regulations of the Rural Rental Assistance Program to better preserve affordable senior and low-income housing in rural communities for the needs of today. As federal loans mature and federal subsidies expire, these updated rules empower HCR to provide direct state rent subsidies and state oversight for these properties to ensure low-income elderly residents don't lose their housing when federal support ends.

Cutting Red Tape for Businesses

• Modernizing the Department of Labor payroll system based directly on employer feedback and submissions into the EXPRESS NY Portal regarding overly complicated and confusing reporting requirements. These changes will reduce administrative burdens for small businesses and streamline routine labor compliance across the state, reducing administrative burdens for nearly 50,000 small businesses and saving them more than 11,000 hours per year.
• Expanding charitable fundraising through beverage labeling through the State Liquor Authority (SLA) to increase fundraising opportunities for charitable organizations. Previously, labeling rules limited the ability of businesses to use their product to raise awareness and provide financial support for important causes.

Modernizing State Operations

• Modernizing 29 state labor dispute proceedings including labor relations claims and dispute procedures, authorizing electronic filing, eliminating unnecessary verification requirements, allowing oral summations, and repealing outdated publication rules which will impact nearly 800,000 public and private sector employees and employers.
• Modernizing community safety and crime prevention rules by repealing obsolete crime prevention regulations from 1983 to reflect the evolution to modern crime-fighting initiatives. These new programs, along with other data-driven strategies and technical assistance to local law enforcement and community organizations, have coincided with record lows in gun violence.
• Repealing outdated wildlife management area regulations, streamlining public use rules across activities such as vehicle use, camping, and boating, under a single, modernized statewide framework.
• Repealing eleven outdated workers' compensation rules including an unused rule for judges, two defunct Medical Appeals Unit regulations, four obsolete regulations over disputed medical bills, and obsolete third-party recovery rules.
• Repealing obsolete transitional care funding rules which governed short-term transitional care funding for young adults aging out of foster care or residential schools.
• Eliminating redundant Medicaid self-disclosure filings if providers are ineligible for the self-disclosure program. This will remove unnecessary administrative filings by providers.
• Streamlining eight technology policies by establishing centralized, uniform standards, repealing obsolete guidance, and consolidating agency technology practices. By eliminating redundant administrative overhead, these enterprise-wide reforms will save time across state agencies, allowing personnel to focus on improving services for New Yorkers.