Incoming N.Y. governor promises swift action
Masking, vaccinations and rental aid among Hochul’s top priorities
ALBANY, N.Y.—Kathy Hochul became the first female governor of New York on Tuesday and in her first hours on the job sought to bring a sense of urgency to tackling big problems that went unaddressed during Andrew Cuomo’s distracted final months in office.
In an afternoon speech in which she laid out her initial priorities, the Democrat promised swift action to improve COVID-19 safety in schools, a fix for broken aid programs for people hit by the pandemic and improved government ethics.
Hochul said she was directing state health officials to make masks mandatory for anyone entering public or private schools. Her administration will also work, she said, to implement a requirement that all school staff statewide either be vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing.
“None of us want a rerun of last year’s horrors with COVID-19,” Hochul said. “Therefore we will take proactive steps to prevent that from happening.”
Hochul pledged quick action to unstick an application bottleneck that has kept federal aid money from flowing to renters who suffered financially because of the pandemic. She said she’s readying the state to distribute vaccine booster shots, when they become widely available, including possibly reopening mass inoculation sites. And she said New Yorkers “can expect new vaccine requirements,” though she didn’t specify what those might be. “More on that soon,” she said. Hochul, a former member of Congress from western New York, took the oath of office just after midnight in a brief, private event overseen by the state’s chief judge, Janet DiFiore.
At a ceremonial swearing-in later Tuesday morning at the state capitol, Hochul promised a “fresh, collaborative approach” to government. She said she had already begun speaking with other Democratic leaders who have, for years, complained about being shut out of key decisions and of being bullied by Cuomo, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “There’ll be no blindsiding; there’ll just be full co-operation,” Hochul said.
For generations, it’s been said that all real decisions in the state government were made by “three men in a room” — the governor and the leaders of the state Senate and Assembly.
Now, for the first time, two of those three — Hochul and Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins — are women. Only the state assembly is led by a man, Speaker Carl Heastie.
Hochul, her daughter and her daughter-in law all wore white to her ceremonial swearing-in Tuesday to honour suffragists who fought to get women the right to vote.
On her first day, Hochul said she was ordering an overhaul of state government policies on sexual harassment, including requiring that all training be done live, “instead of allowing people to click their way through a class” online. And she said she would order ethics training for every state government employee.
Cuomo left office at midnight, two weeks after announcing he would resign rather than face an impeachment battle that appeared inevitable after a report overseen by state Attorney General Letitia James concluded he had sexually harassed 11 women.