LI school districts would get 3.8% increase in state aid with Gov. Hochul's proposed budget

Every 7 minutes on average, a crash causes death, injury or significant damage on Long Island.Cars playing cat and mouse on the Southern State Parkway. Motorists regularly pushing 90 mph on the Long Island Expressway.Drivers casually blowing through stop signs and hitting excessive speeds in residential neighborhoods.On Long Island roadways, crashes that lead to serious injuries or death often do not involve a singular cause.Sometimes drugs or alcohol are at play. Other times, it's the weather or motorists driving aggressively or while distracted. But one thread connecting the bulk of the most serious crashes on Long Island is speed."People don't realize just how dangerous speeding is and how much they're increasing the risks of having an accident by routinely speeding," said Stuart Cameron, a former chief of the Suffolk County Police Department. "They need to just slow down…Probably the most dangerous thing that people do on Long Island is to drive their cars."Robert Brodsky and Michael O'Keeffe report in NEWSDAY that from enhanced driver education and beefed-up enforcement to lowered speed limits and improved road designs, experts contend there are a multitude of ways to reduce Long Islanders' need for speed.But in a region where most of its 3 million residents use a vehicle to get to work or school or to navigate their daily lives, Long Islanders' desire to quickly get where they're going has made the roads increasingly dangerous, according to data analyzed by Newsday and interviews with more than a dozen traffic safety experts, law enforcement officials and victims of speed-related crashes.On Long Island, 65 people were killed in 2024 in crashes where police determined that speed was a contributing factor, up from 51 such fatalities in 2019, according to data from the Institute for Traffic Safety Management & Research in Albany. Across Long Island, speed was a factor in more than 35% of all fatal crashes in 2024, the data shows.Meanwhile, crashes involving serious injuries spiked to a 10-year high in 2024, at 353, according to Institute data."Speeding is avoidable — it is dangerous, and it can be deadly," Transportation Department spokesman Stephen Canzoneri said. "There is no question that speeding makes crashes worse on Long Island and across New York State."***Long Island school districts would see an increase of 3.8% in state aid under New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s budget proposal, which would allocate $200 million more to the region’s schools in 2026-27, a Newsday analysis found.The proposed aid package for Long Island schools totals nearly $5.5 billion, according to aid projection figures released yesterday.If approved by the state legislature, the governor’s proposal would boost funding for most school districts in Nassau and Suffolk.Nine districts would see modest declines in their total aid.Dandan Zou and Michael R. Ebert report in NEWSDAY that state aid makes up about 30% of the total revenue for schools on Long Island, with the majority funded through local property taxes. School taxation makes up roughly two thirds of homeowners' tax bills.Governor Hochul's plan calls for a minimum increase of 1% in Foundation Aid for all districts. Foundation Aid is the largest source of school revenue from the state and represents “new money,” compared with expense-based funding that comes in the form of reimbursements, said Bob Vecchio, executive director of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association.Although the overall amount of Foundation Aid for the region would rise by 2.9% to nearly $4 billion under Hochul's budget plan, educators noted 73 of Long Island’s 121 districts would only see the minimum increase.“This is an encouraging first step but there’s still work to be done,” Vecchio said of the governor’s proposal.Educators said districts face rising costs in insurance, health care premiums and special education and they would advocate for a bigger increase in Foundation Aid.“A 1% increase in Foundation Aid, while helpful, doesn't help close the gap,” said Tim Eagen, superintendent of the Kings Park district and president of the Suffolk County School Superintendents Association.***Two public hearings on creating a new section of town code for “golf cottages” and allowing land preservation credits to be used for their development are on the Riverhead Town Board’s agenda at its 6 p.m. meeting this evening. Beth Young reports in EAST END BEACON that civic associations in Riverhead are concerned that this proposal could be another means the Town of Riverhead is looking to use to attempt to rezone sections of the town code for resort development, after the failure of the town’s widely derided “agritourism resort” code nearly two years ago. Tonight’s Riverhead Town Board Regular Meeting starts at 6:00 PM in Riverhead Town Hall.The meeting can be viewed live here. ***New York Gov. Kathy Hochul spoke yesterday about not tackling any major public safety issues — notably the state’s “Raise the Age” law — in her proposed $260 billion budget for next year. “We have already dealt with many criminal justice reforms that others didn’t think we’d be able to accomplish, including people in this room,” Hochul told reporters. “We did it, so I don’t need to revisit the same reforms. We got them done,” she added.Vaughn Golden and Matt Troutman report in THE NY POST that Hochul's comments on Tuesday stood in contrast to critics who’ve argued the Raise the Age law needs to be fixed or rolled back. The law raised New York’s age of criminal responsibility to 18, barring 16- and 17-year-olds from initially being tried as adults for most non-felonies.But since it was enacted in 2019 along with other criminal justice reforms, many prosecutors and police officials — including NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch — argued it’s to blame for rising violence both committed by and against youths. “When Raise the Age was enacted, the original sponsors acknowledged that the law should be revisited and that adjustments might need to be considered at a future date,” Rensselaer County District Attorney Mary Pat Donnelly, president of District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, wrote in a statement blasting Hochul’s comments. “In the nearly nine years that have passed since Raise the Age first became effected, we have seen limitations and shortcomings in the law, as well as inconsistencies in how the law is interpreted,” the statement said. “Good public policy dictates a thorough examination of Raise the Age and how the state is investing in youth services and crime prevention.”The district attorneys association, which was instrumental in pushing last year’s reforms to the discovery laws, said it wants public hearings and a continued discourse with Hochul and the legislature “to re-examine Raise the Age with an eye towards meaningful changes.” Many progressives, however, contend the real issue is $1 billion in unspent funds to support programs that keep youths out of trouble. Advocates with The Coalition to Protect Raise the Age argued that New York State should not go back to the days when it was one of just two states that automatically tried 16- and 17-year-olds as adults.***Long Island developers hope a proposal to expedite an often lengthy environmental review process will make it easier to build in the region, where low supply has led to sky-high prices for homes in recent years.While housing advocates have lauded the move, the reforms have drawn mixed feedback from Long Island lawmakers and advocates worried about the weakening of a strong legal tool to protect the environment.Celia Young, Brianne Ledda and Tracy Tullis report in NEWSDAY that in the budget for 2026-27, New York Governor Kathy Hochul proposed changes to the State Environmental Quality Review Act — also known as SEQRA — that would cap the process at two years and allow some projects to move forward without the scrutiny that can come with a full environmental assessment.The proposed changes fit with a broader $25 billion five-year housing plan from the governor to address an affordable housing crisis throughout the state and, if they make it into the state’s final budget bill due April 1, would take effect immediately after its passing.The proposed SEQRA reforms have drawn mixed feedback from Long Island lawmakers.East Hampton Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez praised the changes in a news release for their potential to promote affordable housing “so the people who keep our town running can continue living here, including teachers, health care workers, first responders, town employees, and young families.”Brookhaven Town Supervisor Dan Panico said while he’s still evaluating the proposal, the limited sewer capacity in Brookhaven means there likely won’t be many sites that meet the state criteria to forgo additional environmental review.***Three high-ranking U.S. Catholic cardinals Monday said in a statement that the country's aggressive actions at home and abroad are threatening its status as a global moral compass. "The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace," the statement said. Some Long Island Catholics told Newsday they supported the cardinals' statement while others reacted with scorn or said they doubted the clerics' words would make a difference.Asked to comment, Bishop John Barres, head of the Diocese of Rockville Centre,...