N.Y. Lawmakers End Session Without Replacing Congestion Pricing Revenue
The New York Times
State Senate Democrats rebuked Gov. Kathy Hochul over her decision to halt a long-developed plan to charge drivers tolls to enter Manhattan’s core.
Gov. Kathy Hochul defended her decision to halt congestion pricing hours after State Senate Democrats said they would leave Albany without plugging the funding gap left in its absence.
In her first public appearance since announcing she would backtrack from the plan, Ms. Hochul reiterated that the time was not right to increase the burden on New York City’s economy.
“We thought that inflation would be lower,” she said at a news conference Friday night. “We thought that people would feel more secure about going on the subways. Yes, yes, we’re coming back, but we can’t afford a setback.”
At the news conference, Ms. Hochul was pressed for details about when she had changed her mind about congestion pricing and whom she had spoken to beforehand.
While she declined to provide details about the timing of her decision, she described conversations she said she had had with ordinary New Yorkers in diners, naming three diners on the East Side of Manhattan.
Her decision leaves a billion-dollar hole in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s budget, imperiling planned projects and raising grave questions about the future of public transit in the nation’s largest city.
A businessman in the Bronx falsified information on thousands of returns, committing one of the largest tax frauds in Department of Justice history, prosecutors said.
Officials in Wisconsin gave little new information on Tuesday about a shooting that left a student and a teacher dead and six others injured.
The president-elect’s latest attempt to overturn his Manhattan conviction was rebuffed by the judge overseeing the case, who called it “mere hearsay and conjecture.”
Undocumented immigrants whose children or spouses are U.S. citizens are feeling particularly vulnerable to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threats to push them out.
The man whom authorities call a serial killer was charged with second-degree murder in the case of Valerie Mack, who disappeared in 2000.
The Commerce Department is banning the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States, a move that appears unlikely to deter Beijing from conducting sophisticated cyberoperations.
The police in Wisconsin are working to establish a motive for the attack, which left a student and teacher dead and six others injured.
The defendant, Rex Heuermann, is due in court Tuesday. Investigators have been trying to tie him to other unsolved killings on Long Island.
Some Republicans have said that a constitutional convention is overdue. Many Democratic-led states have rescinded their long-ago calls for one, and California will soon consider whether to do the same.
The New York City Campaign Finance Board voted to withhold as much as $4.3 million in matching funds from Mayor Eric Adams, hampering his re-election bid.
He built Mississippi’s Republican Party into a conservative powerhouse, making himself a regional power broker in the process.