Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Announces Investments in Western New York and Highlights Affordability Agenda

Governor Kathy Hochul today rallied with New Yorkers in Buffalo to celebrate the passage of the FY 2027 Enacted Budget which includes a slate of wins for the region, including a historic $70 million in direct aid to the City of Buffalo and a $24 million investment in FeedMore of WNY, a hunger-relief organization that provides nutritious food for food-insecure families.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Thank you, thank you. Oh, how sweet it is to be back home again. Please be seated. It is fantastic to be here and welcomed by one of my dearest friends, a true leader for our state, but also a great champion of Buffalo: our Majority Leader, Crystal Peoples-Stokes, and extraordinary, extraordinary leadership and a heart of gold. I also want to recognize some of my other partners in government here. We have from the state legislature, Senator April Baskin, April. Yeah, all right, thank you. Senator Jeremy Zellner has joined us as well. Assemblymember John Rivera has joined us, Assemblymember Rivera. We also have our Mayor, Sean Ryan, who we'll be hearing from in a few minutes. Local elected officials, who I'll be introducing in a little bit from our various towns, but also Gary Seidel.

Gary Seidel is in charge of - I want to thank him. Where's Gary? I got to know Gary when he was the head of the aquarium in Niagara Falls. Now, when you have connections like being the Governor, you get to do cool things like go behind the scenes, go up to an - this aquarium with octopus in it. And the octopus started wrapping his arm around my arm and started pulling me in. And so luckily Gary saved me from that experience. We had to fight back the octopus that wanted me to join him in the tank, but I lived to see another day, but it is great to see his leadership at a place that I cherish. I spent many years as a child here, brought my own children here, and went to the summer camps all the time where they learn the most interesting things. And I know you've got a great great project going on - the Science Stadium project, which opens next month. Gary, are we still on schedule?

He's in charge of the opening day, but it's how to link STEM learning with sports. And I can't think of a better place on Earth to do that here in Buffalo. Talk about what this is all about, and I was glad the state could help fund it. I look forward to the opening of that. But, it's a great way to engage our kids with their passions. But I am just so honored to be back home. I feel like this community's on fire, it really is. There's so much going on. I'm coming all the time because there's some great events happening. I was just here to talk about the extraordinary resurgence of people coming to the waterfront on the Outer Harbor because we built a world-class park.

Who has not been down to the state park in Buffalo? You all have? Yeah. Because if you haven't, you need to get there today and see this buffalo. And Joan Kesner is here, who is one of the visionaries of this project. But to have a giant buffalo made out of metal, and all the pieces of metal are different birds that migrate over Buffalo, and there's a story behind each one of them. And when I went there the first day, I saw a handful of families. The next day it was mobbed, and it looked like the United Nations - people from all around the world were finding their way there. So my heart just was so filled with joy to see what we created down in that waterfront, and I thank everybody involved in this.

So I was just there on that, I'll be here on June 23 for the ribbon-cutting of the great stadium. We're going to be - and so as I think about some of my priorities as Governor, when I first became the Governor, the first Governor from Buffalo since Grover Cleveland, I did have a few priorities on my list. And number one was, I am keeping the Buffalo Bills in Buffalo, and I'm going to build them a stadium. And now I'm so proud, so proud to say we got it done.

And, whether it's the waterfront, whether it's the cruise ships coming to Buffalo, this was another vision I had when I met with some tourist people up in Quebec who were talking about promoting cruise ships along the Great Lakes, and they went from the Welland Canal to Erie, Pennsylvania. And I said, "Let me show you a map. There's a city called Buffalo that you're missing, and we have extraordinary attractions." So we had to build some infrastructure. We're working on that. But now we're opening up the world to our wonderful community, and people are so in awe of what we have here. So much is going on. The development on the East Side of Buffalo. We're investing millions and millions of dollars in lifting up our communities here, and the economic development and building more housing.

The Perry Street projects, I said I want to get that done. When I just drove in this morning, I said, "I am so proud to see that" - that eyesore that was taunting us for so many decades. Our visitors coming for the first time, and what they saw was abandoned, burned out buildings that were just mocking our great community, as well as the Marine Drive Apartments being worked on right now. So my friends, sometimes when you're living here, you just go along, you don't realize the full impact of what's going on. The future has arrived in Buffalo and Western New York right now, and I am so proud to be the Governor at a time to help drive that economic change. And not just the change in the investments we're making, what we're doing for neighborhoods and communities, but also the psychological change that follows, where there's this sense of pride.

And it's not just in how far the Sabres went, who were last place in December, and they're almost winning it all, except for some bad calls by refs, but that's another story. Kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it? And onward to Buffalo Bills in the fall. But it's been a magical time here in Western New York, so sometimes you have to step away for a little bit and come back and realize all this synergy that's going on, and all these investments that we talked about are finally all coming together, but I also stood before you here in Western New York and made a promise just a couple months ago, that I was going to keep fighting for all of you and make your family my fight, as it always has been. Something I learned here in the streets of Buffalo, in my hometown of Hamburg - that you have to stand up for people and fight. Public service is an extraordinary privilege, and those of us who are honored to have it know that every day matters, and we have to get up and fight like hell for our neighbors and our people all across the state.

We also have other challenges. We have to navigate the chaos and uncertainty that's coming almost hourly out of Washington. The cost of everything has gone up so much because of decisions that did not have to be made. We did not have to go to war with our best trading partner, Canada, and insult them, and tell them they should be the 51st state. And in fact, our Secretary of Commerce, who's supposed to drive commerce, told them they sucked last week. This is what's going on. We have to stand up against it because we love our Canadian friends. They come to our attractions, they come to the museums, they come to our plays at Shea's, they come to our waterfront. They come to visit us, go to our restaurants. We need them, and they need us - so that's one example of an unforced error. Just the tariffs overall, I had a number of forums here in Western New York over the last year talking to business leaders about what this is doing to their bottom line, and it is not good, my friends.

Everything has gone up, and some do not want to pass it on to their customers, but they have to survive themselves. So again, tariffs did not have to happen. The war with Iran, have you checked the price at the pump lately? Up 56 percent since January. It's impossible for homeowners and businesses and delivery services just to keep up with all these costs that no one could have foreseen. No one could have foreseen this. So we have to fight back against that, but also make real investments to show that New York will not be suppressed or daunted by these challenges.

So we need to score real wins and really fix broken systems that make life harder and more expensive, and that's what I did in this year's Budget. I did a lot of research starting since the last Budget ended last year and found out what are some of the pressure points on families? What is driving up the cost? What is stressing people out when they get the monthly bills the most? And sometimes you have to stand up for people against powerful interests. And I will say, out of my top five priorities, that we were told many were dead on arrival in Albany because they were just too hard, we got every single one of them done, and I am proud, and we launched it right here in Western New York.

Let's talk about something that any parent knows about - the high cost of childcare. I put us on a path as New York's first mom Governor who understood what it's like when you have to leave a job you love because you couldn't afford or find affordable childcare. That happened to me in Washington many years ago, and that has not gotten any better. This is a huge cost for our families, and we want to make life more affordable. We need to do more to bring universal childcare to the State of New York. And I've leaned into this. With the support of the Legislature, we've added $8 billion towards childcare, $4.5 billion this year alone because we are going universal - universal means everybody.

And there's a lot of tension on childcare in New York City. They're further ahead of the rest of the state. They have full four-year-old programs, they have full three-year-old programs. I want to make sure we start with that foundation for someone by next fall to have universal four-year-old programs across the State of New York so parents know they don't have to worry about childcare for their four-year-olds. Get to the three-year-olds, then we get to two-year-old programs, and then we're taking care of the babies, so we have a plan. We also have to build capacity. I can't just say there's plenty of childcare now because we need the centers. We need people trained in these skills to take care of our most precious little person in our lives, our children.

So we're focused on this, but I want you to know it's coming. In some places it's already here. So it's been my mission that we need to increase subs - here in Western New York, we've increased subsidies for parents by 153 percent, making life more affordable for many more parents. And so I want to make sure that every single parent knows that they can go to work or live the life they want to, and every child gets a strong foundation right from the start.

Keeping people safe is also our top priority. Right after the pandemic, we saw a huge spike in crime across the nation. Seems like the wheels came off - everybody felt that something had happened, and people felt more at liberty to commit crimes for some reason - we'll have to have sociologists study that phenomenon someday - but it was real, it was real. Even in the city of Buffalo, crimes are starting to spike again after many years of trying to bring them down. And I decided we had to make major investments. Working with my partners in the state government, we had to invest money. $3 billion has been invested since I've been Governor in local policing support, and particularly here in Buffalo. And now we're seeing shootings and violent crimes hit all-time lows, not just lower than last year, all-time lows, and it's extraordinary. Track the history of what it used to be, what we tolerated in our communities in terms of the shootings and the murders and the assaults.

And I spent a lot of time at NYPD last year, and I was with Mayor Ryan not too long ago to announce some really dramatic changes, and I don't take this for granted. I don't expect it to stay this way forever if we take our foot off the gas. But if we can support local policing with money for new technology that they otherwise can't afford - I was so proud to help NYPD last year with funding for drones. The day I was there, they told me that they'd launched it just two weeks earlier, and in that time, they found a senior citizen who had wandered away from his nursing home with dementia, had been lost in the snow, and was partially buried, and that drone that could see at night was able to find that individual and save him. So extraordinary things are happening with technology, as well as license plate readers to go after the criminals who are speeding in our streets and making our school zones more dangerous.

So we've done a lot, but I want to make sure we keep that record funding for police and public safety up there. And this year, staying in front of criminals is sometimes a challenge. They're very clever. Have you heard about how you can make 3D-printed guns on your kitchen table? We've outlawed that. Of course we'd outlaw that, but we're now being the first in the nation to outlaw the printers that allow this to happen. So every 3D printer sold in the state of New York - and we're working with the manufacturers, they understand why this is important - will be prohibited from having the part of it being able to, be enabled to create basically what is a machine style, machine gun weapon capacity. You can literally build - have a little piece this big, the size of a Lego, attach it to a glock, and you can fire 1,200 rounds per minute, and it's extraordinary what this, what that firepower could do in a community that has already been subjected to such horrible violence here, not far from where we are today. So we are the first in the nation because when it comes to gun safety, the federal government may not care, but we sure do because we'll always lead the way here in the state of New York, and you should be proud of that. We got that done.

And I mentioned building housing. I'm obsessed with this because, even here, we used to pride ourselves in Western New York when I was younger, being one of the most affordable places for housing in the entire country. It was always Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, top one, two and three sometimes in the country. No more. Now, for those who own a house, that's a good news story. But what about the barriers to other people who want to have that first home? And it breaks my heart that the young people who were born and raised here, went to college here and want to stay here are now realizing that the dream of owning a home that their parents or grandparents could always expect over a period of time is so far out of reach for them. The average age for a first-time home buyer went from age 30 to age 40 just over the last decade. 40 years old. Now I said this once, and I won't say it again, because I said, "You're almost middle-aged." Everybody who was 40 in that crowd was mad at me for saying you're almost middle-aged. So you're not anywhere close to middle-aged because let's say you're going to live to 120, so middle-age is actually 60. So I have to watch what I say at these events really. You're not middle-aged when you're 40. You're not middle-aged when you're 40.

But think about that. It's not their fault. They're doing everything we're asked to do. They're doing, paying their debt to society, getting an education, or getting the skills for a good job. And because there's not enough supply, housing is at a premium now and so we're going to change that. And I realize that there's laws on the books. One of them is SEQR law, which was built, was put in place in 1975, the State Environmental Review, with all the right intentions. It was needed at the time because no one cared about degradation of our Earth or the skies as we looked at Bethlehem Steel plants spewing smoke into the air. It was my entire childhood. I thought the skies were supposed to be orange, not blue, when I was younger. And Lake Erie was just toxic. You could not swim in it, unlike today, where it's just absolutely beautiful.

So we needed to do more, but now localities have stepped up, and there's multiple levels of review already to protect our environment. So I said, for building housing projects, let's look at SEQR. Let's get it out of the way. Let's cut the red tape. Let's get rid of all the hassles and say to the NIMBYs, "You'll no longer have this tool to be able to stop any project you want just because you don't want it there, but this community needs it." And this is only after the local officials have said they want a project, right? We're not telling a locality what to do or not to do. I wouldn't have appreciated that when I was on the Town Board in Hamburg for 14 years. We do not want Albany telling you what to do. You make your decisions, but I'm going to give you the tools to make it easier and faster when you want to build, and let's build some more. And then we'll get the supply, and then we'll start driving down prices.

And don't think that this is a hypothetical. There is a wonderful community called New Rochelle I visited, about 80,000 people in Westchester County. They, at one point just a few years ago, had about 39 housing permits a year. They decided to go aggressive and scale back on all the burdens that were at the local level to build housing. Now they're averaging 1,000 housing units per year. They have 11,000 on the books. And not only did the price of housing stop going up, it's now declining. They're, literally the rents are going down in this community, and it is vibrant. Everybody wants to live there. That can be us. That has to be us. And that's what I'm doing at the state level, working with my partners to remove some of the barriers that literally take two more years of review, two extra years for every single project because of this law on the books.

No more. We got it done, and I want to thank all the partners I had, we had. I want to say all the elected officials who showed up. And if you're in the audience, we had Supervisor Shawn Lavin who showed up. Mayor Austin Tylec, are you here? Okay, stand up. These are my ambassadors who came here. Mayor Mike Ferguson, Mayor Restanio, Kate Wdowiasz, Mayor Bill Strassberg, [inaudible] and also former Supervisor Joe Emminger. These individuals traveled to Albany from far away and lobbied and went and visited the Legislators to explain to them that we are the ones who control this at the local level. We'll do the right thing, but let us build. And I want to thank you for showing up when I need you the most. So thank you.

Now when communities say yes to development, we're going to let them build. Now we have some other pressure points. I mentioned thinking about the pile of bills at the end of the month, or if you get them on your cell phone - you don't want to see them that often, I wouldn't do that. But listen, auto insurance. Auto insurance premiums are so high. In fact, in New York, we have the highest in the nation. Highest in the nation, and we have the highest number of staged crashes in America. People setting up criminal enterprises, literally working with some corrupt lawyers - most, vast majority are not corrupt. I'm a lawyer. They're all pretty good. But then you have some corrupt lawyers, a handful of them, making it worse for everybody else who get some corrupt doctors and some individuals who literally fake crashes, and we have dash cam video of someone setting up a crash and creating a whole dynamic where they exaggerate the size of the injury, and they get these huge payouts. And the insurance companies just settle. It's just easier.

But they're passing on that cost to all of us. So we had to root out the rampant fraud that is driving up the premiums because it was just too hard in the past. People did not want to take this issue on. Now, I'm from Buffalo, and I don't mind a fight, and it was tough, but I'm telling you right now, the package of reforms that our Legislature passed, that our initiative, are the same they've done in other states like Florida and Georgia. And you know what happened? The premiums stopped going up, which is progress, and after a little bit of time, about a year, they started going down seven percent, the next year eight percent, 10 percent. The premiums were going down, and that is what I committed to the people of this state. I will take on this fight. It's a difficult one, but we will be successful, and I'll hold the insurance companies accountable.

And we have a whole package of reforms for the insurance industry as well. Nobody gets out of this. But I want to do all of this for you because it should no longer be the case for these, some of these crooks, these individuals who are intentionally scamming the system, should be ending up with huge jackpot payouts. And so that's just one more way we're delivering on the affordability agenda. We're going to build more housing. We take care of childcare. We take care of the cost of auto insurance. And again, I keep referring back to the insanity in Washington right now, and you have Donald Trump using your taxpayer dollars to build a ballroom, and he set up a fund at one point to pay out the rioters who were attacking police officers.

Now, contrary to that scenario, we're working hard to put money back in people's pockets, and we're continuing the largest middle-class tax rate cut in American - in state history. We did this last year. It's continuing. This year, people are still getting the thousand-dollar tax credit if you have children under the age of four, $500 if the children are higher - older. And we're also putting a billion dollars into people's pockets in a utility rebate to help people with the cost of their utilities. So these are areas, again, I will continue working with my Legislature, great people - you have incredible leaders from here - and also just say this: We're done paying for CEOs' lavish trips and bonuses. Utility, insurance companies, we're not paying for that anymore. People are struggling too hard. We're not paying for that.

I'll also say as a former waitress - I make really good chicken wings still and pizza that's second to none. We still have the best pizza right here, but I know how to make it. We're done taxing tips. When you work hard and work at the end of the day and put together all the change or the money you've made in tips, that should not be taxed by the government to take it out. That is your money. So I want to thank the Legislature for working with me to get that done as well.

So, I think about some of the projects here in Western New York that are so important. We're putting together the Budget, I think about the local communities and what makes most sense to them. What are their priorities? And at a time when there's so much food insecurity, it is rampant. More people are lining up at food banks and in churches and places you can get help every week. It's sad. And many of these people are people who have jobs. They're just not able to make ends meet. So this year we're investing $24 million into FeedMore Western New York, a great group that's on the front lines to make sure that everybody has access to a healthy meal.

And also, this is important to me. Healthcare for women is really important, and I want to give a special shoutout to April Baskin for an issue that was important to her as well, and that's why spending $2 million to expand OBGYN and maternal health services in East Buffalo, and I thank her for her effort, and thanks to Crystal Peoples-Stokes' effort as well. Thank you. So every new and expectant mom deserves quality care. The rates of infant and maternal mortality in Black and Brown families is still off the charts, and we are dead set on changing that. We want to make sure that every family has a healthy start when they - especially new moms.

And again, I also want to talk about just - we're beginning to wrap up here because there's so much to talk about, I can go on forever. We're doing a lot. And I often think when I'm in Albany, the perspective of local government, because that's where I spent most of my time. And I know that is where it all meets the road because you are the ones who are responsible. You're the ones who actually worry about water and sewer lines. I do, too, but this is what you think about. You wonder how you're going to afford the next transportation project, how you're going to replace a firetruck in your community because the cost of everything is so high. These are real stressors on our localities, and so I talk to local officials all the time. I come back home and I think about it, and I think about how I can help them. And so I know this is a challenging moment for many of them, and these reckless federal cuts, and we lost $10 billion in healthcare alone. I want you to know that we are trying so hard to get out from under these cuts. $10 billion just since last summer gone, evaporated.

Money that we used to count on for nutrition programs - rural healthcare is teetering right now. Always challenged, but now without the support, we've had to step up with unprecedented resources to help all levels of healthcare, just to keep our people healthy and give them what they deserve because the federal government literally walked away from that commitment. So I know this can have a real effect, but I said, "I don't want our communities left alone. I don't want them to have to weather the storms by themselves." And I want to mention that Buffalo in particular, the new Mayor, who inherited a real challenge here, real problems, and I've been a resident of the city for a long time myself, and I know the challenges and I want to just point out that our Budget delivers $231 million in total aid for Buffalo. $70 million new on top of what was already appropriate in the past to help with fire and police and EMS and all the other services - snow removal, local roadwork. And Mayor Ryan, I have a special gift for you. I want to - come on up here. You have to take this to the bank right now.