When Abundance New York released our voter guide earlier this month, few were surprised that we had endorsed Governor Kathy Hochul in her re-election bid against Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman.
As believers in a New York that builds, we’ve applauded the Governor’s consistent focus on housing—dating back to her bold, if ill-fated, 2023 Housing Compact and subsequent actions to lift the residential floor area ratio (FAR) cap and reform environmental review processes; her eagerness to champion big infrastructure projects, from Micron’s chip fab to the Interborough Express (IBX); and her willingness to stand up to Trump repeatedly on issues ranging from the Gateway Tunnel to congestion pricing.
Many Democratic officials tout their records of standing up to Trump or Republicans. What gives us confidence in the Governor as a true abundance champion is her willingness to stand up to her own allies to enact smart, pro-growth policies. This is where Hochul shines: on issues both widely understood and wonky, she has shown a willingness to challenge orthodoxy, skepticism toward entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo, and a focus on tackling the cost drivers imposed by the state’s own rules and regulations—all in service of affordability and growth.
Take SEQRA reform, a signature accomplishment of this past year’s budget cycle. Passed in 1975, the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA) requires state and local governments to study the environmental impacts of development and allows community groups to sue over the process. While well-intentioned—Hochul herself recalls orange sunsets over Lake Erie from toxic steel plants—SEQRA went further than environmental laws in other states by applying review to all zoning and land-use actions. For housing projects requiring zoning changes, the review added an average of two years and inflated construction cost by an estimated 10% to 17%. After her Housing Compact fell short in 2023, Hochul focused on SEQRA reform as a low-salience, high-impact way to build faster and cheaper. Few voters had a firm opinion on the law, and reforming SEQRA meant pushing past opposition from environmental groups and local officials. Hochul spent political capital anyway: she unveiled the agenda earlier this year alongside Mayor Zohran Mamdani, finding common cause across factional differences, and let the budget process run late to get it done.
Reforming auto insurance was a different kind of fight. While few voters link environmental review to their rent, nearly all vehicle owners feel the pain of insurance premiums; New York’s are among the highest in the country. As with SEQRA reform, the Governor identified key cost drivers—in this case, a vague “serious injury” standard that encouraged litigation and a pure comparative negligence standard that allowed mostly at-fault drivers to collect damages—and proposed reforms estimated to reduce premiums by $200. To get these technical fixes over the finish line, Hochul took the fight public, framing it as an affordability battle between everyday drivers and the bad actors driving up their costs. This put her at odds with the powerful New York State Trial Lawyers Association, a lobby traditionally aligned with state Democrats. She held the line, let the budget run late, and secured nearly all of her core reforms. By pairing these changes with a cap forcing insurers to return excess profits to drivers, Hochul created a structural fix rather than a temporary rebate, altering the rules that inflated costs in the first place.
In a third area—civil service hiring—Hochul again targeted the structural issues causing high vacancy rates and slow service delivery across state agencies: outdated titles, infrequent exam schedules, and inflexible candidate selection rules. This time, she pursued a shorter-term solution through NY HELPS, a program that waived exams for thousands of open-competitive-class state and municipal government titles and provided a path to permanent employment, yielding 60,000 civil service appointments across the state. Although the New York State Public Employees Federation opposed the initiative and municipal unions sued to block New York City from adopting it, Hochul pressed forward and recently extended the program through mid-2028.
Yet New York should not rely on renewing temporary emergency measures to fill public-sector jobs; it should codify the lessons of NY HELPS into law. Permanent civil service reform is the natural next step in Hochul’s approach. Just as she traced housing shortages and insurance premium spikes back to state rules, the root cause of agency dysfunction is a slow, rigid hiring system. Every priority she champions—from housing to clean energy to child care—depends on a government that can hire efficiently. We are eager to see her pursue a post-NY HELPS agenda in the upcoming legislative cycle. The state should set continuous recruitment as the default, eliminate exams for roles that already require professional licensing, replace the rigid “rule of three” with band scoring to expedite hiring, and execute comprehensive title consolidation and pay modernization to attract top talent to public service. Because much of New York City’s hiring framework is governed at the state level, these Albany-led reforms could deliver progress where City Hall has stalled.
We have not agreed with every decision—we opposed her pause on congestion pricing and the rollback of certain climate targets—but on the issues vital to a New York that builds, she has demonstrated the resolve to change the rules, even when it means crossing her allies. Civil service reform will test that resolve once more, as the same unions that fought NY HELPS may resist a permanent version. But with Mayor Mamdani’s new civil service task force, there’s an opening for the same kind of state-city partnership that delivered child care. Abundance New York is proud to endorse Kathy Hochul for Governor—and we’ll be right there with her to ensure New York’s government can deliver on everything she’s promised.