For the first time since she took office in 2021, Governor Kathy Hochul won’t be taking a stack of unsigned bills with her into the Christmas holiday. This year, she has already either signed or vetoed all but two of the 856 bills that passed the state legislature. (One of them is the controversial Medical Aid in Dying Act, which she’s promised to sign; the other would add two judicial districts in western New York, and is still up in the air.) She’s moved quickly in part by vetoing more bills than usual: 140, or more than 16% of those the Senate and Assembly passed. Last year, she vetoed fewer and negotiated over more. The only year Hochul issued more vetoes was 2022, when lawmakers passed a whopping 1,010 bills — the highest number in at least three decades — and the governor axed 166 of them.

This year’s vetoes range from predictable (like the Grieving Families Act, nixed for the fourth time in a row) to confounding, like a bill to protect a corporate transparency law Hochul championed in 2023. As Chris Bragg writes below, the law is now poised to be crippled by new federal rules, just when it was set to take effect.

Hochul vetoed other transparency bills this year, too, including two geared toward strengthening New York’s Freedom of Information Law. As Chris Gelardi recently wrote, the “new era of transparency” she promised upon taking office is still pending.

Good government groups bristled at those decisions but celebrated others, including her veto of a bill that would have required every subway car to be operated by at least two people and another that would have carved out parts of the Bronx’s Co-op City from bus lane enforcement cameras.

She also vetoed a slew of bills this year that would have expanded retirement or disability benefits for various state and local employees. (She did, however, sign 20-odd other bills extending benefits to specific public employees, such as a corrections officer in Monroe County and a police officer in Port Chester.) And for the second time, she rejected a push to speed up payments to the nonprofits the state relies on to deliver countless social services.

As usual, Hochul blamed many vetoes — about half — on a lack of cash, arguing that the bills would require spending that hadn’t been planned for in the state budget. That included one that would have created an independent office to represent utility customers in rate hike proceedings.

Altogether, Hochul vetoed or negotiated amendments to 228 bills this year, or 27%, once again using her bill-signing powers more aggressively than any of her recent predecessors.

Don’t count on lawmakers to override any of the vetoes — even for the 60-odd bills that passed unanimously. The maneuver is unheard of in Albany, where lawmakers are getting ready to square off with the governor in frenzied budget negotiations where she holds the cards.

Here are some highlights among the scores of bills Hochul vetoed in 2025. — Colin Kinniburgh

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A 180 on corporate transparency

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Two years ago, Hochul signed a bill requiring limited liability companies in New York to share more information about their true owners. The law aimed to make it harder for white collar criminals to hide behind shell companies; Hochul said it would curb “wage theft, money laundering, tenant mistreatment and other unlawful activity.”

The law is set to take effect Jan. 1 — but Hochul just issued a veto that will likely dramatically limit its scope.

In March, the Trump administration issued rules undercutting similar federal legislation by making the disclosure requirement only apply to foreign LLCs. The 2023 state law had relied on language tied to the federal law. So in June, the legislature passed a bill updating definitions in the state law to ensure it applied as intended to both foreign and domestic companies.

Business interests had long lobbied against the disclosure requirement and argued it would burden small businesses with paperwork and fines. In her veto message, Hochul wrote that the newer state bill would create a mandate for New York businesses “not required under federal law” and that imposing “additional requirements on LLCs” was not in the interest of the state. As a result, the New York law will likely only apply to foreign LLCs.

“The llc Transparency Act is the most important anti-corruption law passed during Hochul’s first term,” said John Kaehny, executive director of the government reform group Reinvent Albany. “With this veto, she basically just destroyed it and sided with the Trump administration’s nullification of the federal law.” — Chris Bragg

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Freedom to withhold information

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LLCs aren’t the only bodies Hochul shielded from transparency this year. The governor vetoed two bills that sought to strengthen the state’s Freedom of Information Law, which allows members of the public to request records from government agencies.

The first bill would have phased in new deadlines for fulfilling public records requests and forced agencies to justify any delays to a state body — an attempt to fix FOIL’s current deadlines, which agencies can extend indefinitely. (New York Focus reporters have pending requests over three years old.) In her veto message, Hochul called the deadlines “arbitrary” without acknowledging that the bill offered ways to extend them. She also expressed concern over lack of funding, which she largely controls via the governor-led state budget process.

The second bill was meant as a corrective to recent controversial court decisions. This year, a state appellate court issued four brief rulings asserting that, with limited exceptions, agencies can withhold entire documents if any portion of them is unreleasable via FOIL, rather than simply redact the unreleaseable portions. Legislators have decried the rulings as incorrect, as has the Committee on Open Government, a body within Hochul’s Department of State. Hochul vetoed it, calling the legislation “duplicative of current law.” Her veto message didn’t mention the appellate decisions.

The deadline bill unanimously passed both the Senate and the Assembly, and all but two legislators voted in favor of the corrective bill. The vetoes further entrenched the governor as a patron of secrecy in the eyes of reform organizations. For the third year in a row, the New York Coalition for Open Governmentplaced Hochul on the coal-receiving side of its annual “naughty or nice” list, while Reinvent Albany lambasted the governor for repeatedly shutting down reforms to New York’s public records system, which is one of the slowest in the country. — Chris Gelardi

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Utility consumer advocate

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For the fifth year in a row, lawmakers in June passed a bill intended to give New Yorkers a greater voice in the byzantine process that governs their energy bills. And for the fifth time, Hochul rejected it.

In 2022, ’23, and ’24, the legislature sought to allow watchdog groups to recoup some of their expenses from participating in utility proceedings. Hochul’s three vetoes of the legislation made her position on it clear.

This year, lawmakers revived another approach, which they last tried in 2021: a bill aimed at creating an office of the “Utility Consumer Advocate.” They hoped that, amid mounting concern about energy affordability, the governor might be more receptive this year.

She wasn’t. Hochul axed the bill alongside a suite of others creating commissions and task forces, which she said would together cost the state about $30 million it hadn’t budgeted. She didn’t elaborate on the utility legislation specifically. In the past, she has argued that the state already has offices advocating on behalf of consumers. But as I’ve reported, those offices are far smaller than those in many other states and that New York itself once had.

Bill Ferris, legislative representative for aarp New York, said it’s hard to understand why Hochul has dug in against the legislation. “The only thing we can come up with is that she listens to the utility companies who don’t want to change the game,” he said.

In a new analysis, published after Hochul’s veto, aarp found that the state’s nine largest utilities collectively spent more than $31 million in customer funds on their own legal and expert representation in recent rate hike proceedings.

Hochul also vetoed threeother pieces of utility-related legislation this year, two of which — requiring the companies to give customers more notice ofrate hikes andconstruction work — passed almost unanimously. –Colin Kinniburgh

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Subscription fees for car features

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What if you had to pay a monthly fee to turn on your car seat’s heat in the winter? Or to start it remotely?

Charging car owners for built-in features, even after they purchase their cars, is a rapidly expanding sector of the auto industry. By the end of the decade, GM hopes to make up to $25 billion a year in subscriptions — AKA charging buyers for features that they expect to be free once they’ve bought the car.

A bill from Senator James Skoufis and Assemblymember William Magnarelli would have banned this practice, barring carmakers from requiring subscriptions for any features that come with their cars and don’t cost the maker additional money to operate after purchase. It would have allowed the companies to charge for features that rely on internet or cellular connections.

The bill passed both houses of the legislature overwhelmingly, with only two votes against it. In her veto message, Hochul said that while she supports “strong consumer protections,” the bill “limits consumer choices and may increase the costs of new vehicles.”– Sam Mellins

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Two-person train crews

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Public transit boosters showered Hochul with praise for nixing a bill that would have mandated that every subway train have both an operator and a conductor. Her veto message argued that trains can be safely run by an operator alone, as the vast majority of major subways and commuter trains in peer cities already are.

Most New York City subways currently have two crew members, so this veto won’t change the status quo much. But it leaves a path open for changes in the future, or for new lines such as the planned Interborough Express in Brooklyn and Queens to have one driver, or even run automatically. Switching to one-person crews could save the subway system hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group.

In recent weeks, transit planners and advocates pushed for Hochul to veto the bill, while John Samuelsen, president of the Transport Workers Union, lobbied aggressively for her to sign it, arguing that two-person crews are necessary for passengers’ safety. He dug in after the veto, framing the issue in populist terms.

“Neither the gentrifiers, nor the politicians, nor the wonky academics are going to defeat the Transport Workers Union,” hetweeted. “Cry over your kale chips and ridiculous mocktails, but you’re not going [to] eliminate our Conductors.” — Sam Mellins

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Nonprofit contracts

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Nonprofits make up the backbone of New York’s safety net, providing critical services ranging from emergency housing to addiction treatment. But the state hasn’t been a reliable customer.

Government payments that routinely arrive late have forced many organizations to operate on razor-thin margins, take out costly lines of credit, downsize, or shutter completely. One recent survey suggests that the state could collectively owe over $650 million to nonprofits for services already rendered. Ongoing funding cuts at the federal level have only heightened the pressure on nonprofits who are serving more New Yorkers while receiving less support.

Hochul vetoed a bill that would have provided some relief by streamlining the contracting process, requiring the state to make certain partial payments in advance, and paying interest to nonprofits in cases of delayed funding. Her veto memo cited a potential increase in “the risk of fraud and abuse of state funds.” — Jie Jenny Zou

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This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a non-profit news publication investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/368trn9p.