Earlier this afternoon, Governor Hochul rallied in Onondaga County with community leaders and elected officials to deliver an agenda that makes New York more affordable and fights for working families. The Governor advocated for her state budget plan that will let New York build more housing, lower the costs of auto insurance, put the state on a path to universal child care, and prioritize energy affordability by holding the line against rising utility costs that are hitting families across the state.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

 It's the Syracuse Dance Party, same as when I was a student a couple years ago. First of all, thank you for welcoming me back home. I love this part of our state. It is part of my heart. It's the heart of our state and the elected leaders you have here are extraordinary and you just heard from our brand new, on fire Mayor, Sharon Owens. I want to thank her for her leadership already in such a short time, making an imprint, making sure that people understand her values and who she's standing for and who she's fighting for, and I consider her one of my greatest allies. Let's give our Mayor another round of applause.

Rob Simpson, who has been a real driver of change here in Central New York, bringing lots of businesses, which means lots of jobs and lots of opportunities to build. And so, I want to thank him and everyone who's part of the CenterState operations and Randy Wolken, our president of MACNY, and Julie LaFave, the director of the State Fair, I was all excited to pull in. I'm so used to going over to my maple syrup stand and getting some maple candy, cotton candy, right? Yes. Then I usually get like a fried pumpkin pie. Then I have to get my Italian sausage, so I pull up here for those. I was like, where's all my food? Summertime. Summertime, I'll be back.

But it is great to be here and our comptroller, I thank you for speaking as well, Comptroller Masterpole, and all the other electeds who are here today. It is fantastic to be back here. And you heard some of the areas that are really exciting and one of them is taking down a road that was there since I was a student, I-81, and as a student, I never understood why someone built a road to divide the campus from the city. And now we're finally having a reunification, bringing the family back together, and in its place, building housing, which I find incredibly exciting.

That is good news. You know, I've been focused on bringing business here. There's little business, I forget the name - what is it called? Micron? Micron is coming. You know what that means? We need to build more housing because more people are coming here and more jobs are being created. So that is exciting as well, and I know there's a couple other great things.

I think about the campus as I go by here, and I've been very focused on two things. One is basketball. How could you not be? GMAC is coming home. Very exciting new era for Syracuse basketball and I went to all the games when I was a student here, it's a real source of pride for this community. But I will continue making investments in this community, and I remember being back at Syracuse University and I've been focused on affordability so long, you know what I did when I was a student? I launched a boycott of the bookstore because the prices were too high. Look it up in the Daily Orange. I was on the cover. You know why? Because I wasn't going to many classes. I literally had to take incompletes so I could be on the picket-line. And I used to walk around saying, "Boil, boil, toil and trouble, all they do is charge us double." We thought - I digress, but making life more affordable has been part of who I am since I was that 18-year-old in a pair of jeans a few years ago, but fighting for people ever since then.

And so I'm honored to be your Governor to take on the fights of today and what those fights are all about, are about trying to help families that are struggling. Families are just saying, "Enough is enough. I surrender. I cannot afford any more higher bills." Because, first of all, the highest bill they pay is either their mortgage or their rent. And you know why rent and housing is so expensive? Because we never built enough to meet the demand. Now it's real simple - Economics 101 at SU: supply. You build more supply, the prices will go down. And this is not me saying this, this is what happened in a place called New Rochelle, a community of about 80,000. 80,000 put out, have built another 11,000 more housing units. Guess what? Not only did prices stop going up or stay the same, they saw a reduction in rental prices.

So that's what I want to do. I can feel that already here in Central New York. We have to build more housing. But you know what's been a problem? We've had some laws in place that make it almost impossible to build. There's so many projects that could happen, but because of duplicative laws that are in place, the SEQRA law that's been there since 1975, back when we didn't have many laws to protect the environment - and my God, we needed them then - but now, local governments already do the reviews. So if a local community, your City Council, your Town Boards, your villages, if they want a project to build on, whether it's housing or child care or clean energy projects, clean water projects, they should not have to have a two year delay, an additional cost for developers. I say let them build. Are you with me on that? Let them build. Let's build more. Let's build more housing, put people to work, create more jobs, create more opportunities. So that's part of my agenda of what I'm fighting for and why I've been crisscrossing this state. I've been barnstorming from Buffalo to Rochester here to Syracuse and Albany after this, giving the message and bringing together people from our community who deeply care about what we're doing and why this Budget matters. A budget is a statement of your priorities. It's who you're fighting for, and I'm fighting so hard to get these changes, but there's opposition in Albany, so your voices matter, and I'm going to harness the power in this room and rooms all across the state and say, "We need a more affordable New York. Let's get it done. Let's build."

So let's talk about the housing. We build the housing, people can live here, prices go down. Next major driver of costs: your utility bills. We had a brutal winter. It was tough. Hope it's over, hope it's over. I remember the summer I met my husband, June 3rd, 1980, it started snowing in Buffalo, New York. It's like, oh I just spent four years at Syracuse, like now it's snowing in Buffalo in the summer. Anyhow, I digress again. But this is what happens when I come home, this is family to me and I know that we paid such high bills. People are just trying to make ends meet. And then they get that crusher bill at the end of January, February, now March, and how do we help them? My fear is that those bills will go up under a law that was passed.

You have to understand, I'm a hardcore environmentalist. I want to protect our environment. I have grandbabies now because I also have to fight for them. But also, we had to have some common sense approach to this. In 2019 when this very aspirational, great law, nation-leading, that really had very ambitious and aggressive standards we had to meet to reduce our emissions, it was great, but that's a year before the world changed with the pandemic. One year later. That threw us off kilter. No projects were being built because of costs of supply chain parts for our renewable energy projects across the oceans. They just shut down. They got jammed up in ports. Remember all that? All those ports that were sitting there, things that were not happening. That slowed us down for years right there. And then we come out of the pandemic, inflation drove up the cost of building these renewable energy projects. What happens after inflation? Tariffs. Now everything coming from overseas and a lot of these projects, offshore wind, etc. are being manufactured overseas and shipped here.

And lastly, and not least, we now have a hostile government in Washington. Donald Trump has declared war on renewable energy, declared war. He wants to drill, baby drill. He only wants coal, he wants oil, and that's it. And he wants us to do fracking here in the State of New York. And I said, no and hell no. I'm protecting our environment. You can count on that but here's the thing, the advocates went to court because it was taking longer than we thought, clearly for all the reasons I explained to you, anybody would understand that. Now a judge has said we have to meet those standards right now. Right now, not years from now. So what that means is utility bills that you're already getting crushed under, that are making life so hard for New Yorkers are going to go up - upwards of $4,000 a year per family - and I feel like I'm purveying all this really bad news, but the war in Iran, have you checked the prices at the pump lately? It's up about a dollar from a few weeks ago. If this law is not changed, as I'm trying to do with this Legislature right now, the cost of gasoline will go up an extra $2.23 cents per gallon on top of the increases you're already seeing.

I don't think families can stand that. I think that is asking too much. I think we have to say no. We have to put our families first and our businesses that are struggling. I don't want any more businesses to go out of state either. We need them here. So I'm saying, with your help, to talk to your Legislators, your Assemblymembers, your Senators. Let your voices be heard. Help us build more housing by changing the SEQRA law when it comes to building housing. Help us change the climate law so we can keep your utility bills down. We're not saying no to it. We're just saying give us a longer runway. Just more time in light of everything that's happened.

And lastly, this is one probably you didn't see coming. Has your car insurance premium bill gone up? Oh my God. We now pay the highest in the nation - New Yorkers. And I'm thinking my drivers are just as good as anybody else's. I'm going to defend all of you. Don't prove me wrong now. Be careful out there, drive slowly. But get this, I ask questions like, why are we the highest? What's behind that? What's going on here? And the answer is two things: were the number two in the nation for stage crashes - people faking crashes so they can sue the deep pockets of somebody and have a jackpot payday, right? They're just trying to get a lot of money out of the courts. That money isn't coming from the courts, it's coming from the insurance companies who are taking it out of your pockets, right? So that's one side of the equation - a bunch of criminals scamming, attorneys are a part of it. Some doctors are exaggerating the cost of, or the scale of the injury so the payout's higher, so we'll deal with that. You get, if a drunk driver goes through a red light, causes an accident and recovers damages if they say they got hurt in something they created. Okay, that's crazy.

On the other side, our liability laws, our tort laws they're called, are just out of sync with the rest of the country. So it's so easy to go to a jury and get millions and millions of dollars for injuries elsewhere that someone else, that you may have caused yourself. We have to put an end to that. We'll take care of our people, we always do, but there's 35 states that are doing it differently. I want to be among those because I know, as happened in the state of Florida, they initiated the same laws that I'm trying to change right now in this session of the Legislature, and their premiums came down 10 percent the first year. I think that's a good outcome, don't you think? Do you want to have your premiums come down? And we'll make sure that happens.

So those are three areas where your voices need to be cranked up, cranked up, because right now there's people in Albany who don't agree with you. They're okay with you paying higher utility bills. They don't think it's a problem for you. I do. If you're with me, if you think we should fight and stand together and march toward the Capitol and say - regular New Yorkers, maybe you're not organizing, you're not part of a group, you're just a regular New Yorker - you also have rights as well. And I'll tell you right now, you have a Governor that sees you and understands you and will fight for you, but we've got a lot of forces against us, a lot of forces.

So that's what this is all about. That's why I came here today. So I just have a couple questions for you: Are you with me as we fight to lower utility costs in our houses? Are you with me as we fight to lower car insurance premiums? Are you with me when we lower the cost of building more housing? Then I know we can do this together. Let's get it done. Let's get it done. Let's get it done. Thank you very much, everybody. Thanks for coming out today.

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