By Staff Reporter
This is an opinion column. It reflects the views of the writer.
When New York State hires a Buffalo nonprofit to give legal help to an older resident, run a shelter bed or staff a mental health program, the work usually starts on time. The money usually doesn’t.
Two bills sitting in Albany would make the state pay its bills more like a responsible customer. Gov. Kathy Hochul has vetoed versions of this reform twice. She should sign this year’s bills, and if she won’t, the Legislature should be ready to override her.
The state is late most of the time
This is not a hunch from advocates. It is the state’s own record. State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s annual prompt contracting report, released in May, found that of 6,926 nonprofit contracts state agencies reported in 2025, 5,286, or 76%, were processed after their start or renewal dates. That was barely better than 78% the year before. Fourteen agencies reported that every one of their contracts was late.
“Unfortunately, over three decades later, the State continues to fall short in meeting the law’s requirements,” Mr. DiNapoli wrote, referring to the Prompt Contracting Law New York passed in 1991.
The law already says the state owes interest when a late contract causes a missed payment. In 2025, eleven agencies paid $379,544 in interest on 430 contracts. Another 2,810 late contracts were reported as potentially eligible for interest, and no interest was paid on them during the reporting period, the report says.
Behind those numbers are real organizations here. As The Chronicle reported Wednesday, Western New York nonprofit leaders are pressing the governor to sign the bills.
“It’s getting worse every year, in terms of how we get paid and the length of time it takes to get paid … If I don’t get paid, I have two choices,” Karen Nicolson, CEO of Buffalo’s Center for Elder Law and Justice, told Buffalo Toronto Public Media. “I can borrow money until I get paid — because you get paid after you do the services — or I can lay off my staff for a few months, or longer, until the money comes in.”
Neither choice serves the people the state hired her to help.
What the bills do
Both bills are sponsored by state Sen. Shelley Mayer and Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, Westchester Democrats, and both passed the Legislature in early June.
The first, S.9761/A.10741, is modest. It requires the state’s “written directives,” the orders that tell a nonprofit to start work before a contract is signed, to include an invoice schedule and the dates the agency plans to pay. It raises the cap on the state’s existing short-term revolving loan fund for nonprofits from half of a first-quarter payment to the full payment. And it says only material defects, not clerical or rounding errors under $100, can stop the payment clock.
The second, S.9855/A.11179, goes further. It would require a 25% advance within 30 days of executing a nonprofit contract, with comparable advances when services continue under a directive while a renewal is delayed. The sponsors’ memo says advances would apply only where funds have been appropriated and not where federal funding rules forbid them. The Assembly passed it 132-0, and the Senate passed it 56-4, according to LegiScan’s roll call records.
The governor’s objections deserve a fair hearing
Ms. Hochul’s concerns are not frivolous. In vetoing last year’s version in December, she wrote that mandatory advances would “run afoul of the state constitution” and could send money to groups not yet fully vetted, and that interest on late payments would carry a “significant cost to the state,” Central Current reported.
“This bill raises serious legal and fiscal concerns and increases the risk of fraud and abuse of state funds,” she wrote.
A governor should guard public money. But the sponsors went back and wrote around her objections. The Assembly memo for S.9761 says it “directly addresses those concerns by removing provisions mandating automatic advance payments and automatic interest adjustments,” and lists its fiscal impact as none. There is no fraud argument against telling a nonprofit when it will be paid.
The advance bill is a closer call, but it ties the 25% payment to a contract the state has already executed, with money already appropriated. A group that has cleared that process has been vetted. If the governor still believes a piece of it is unconstitutional, she should say exactly which piece and negotiate a fix with the sponsors, not hand down a third blanket veto.
In last year’s veto, Ms. Hochul also directed her Office of Customer Experience to look for administrative burdens that slow nonprofits down. The comptroller’s 76% figure is the scorecard on how that has gone so far.
Late payments cost money too
The real cost of the current system does not show up in the state budget. It shows up in nonprofits’ loan interest, in drained reserves and in staff laid off between contracts.
Sal Curran, executive director of the Volunteer Lawyers Project of Central New York, helped write an earlier version of the bill. Central Current has reported that the group took out a loan to keep working at a time when the state owed it about $1.1 million. “It isn’t fair,” Curran told the outlet. “We need a systemic fix to this.”
A statewide survey cited in the sponsors’ memo found 33% of nonprofits awarded state funds were owed more than $58 million for services already delivered, which the sponsors estimate scales to about $650 million statewide. That is New York borrowing, interest-free, from the organizations least able to lend.
What should happen now
Bills passed in June are often not sent to the governor until the end of the year. That habit gives Albany a quiet place to bury them. Here is what should happen instead.
Senate and Assembly leaders should deliver both bills to the governor now, while there is still time to negotiate.
Ms. Hochul should sign S.9761 without delay. If she has a specific constitutional objection to S.9855, she should put it in writing and agree on a fix with the sponsors.
Western New York’s state senators and Assembly members, who represent the Buffalo groups carrying these costs, should say publicly whether they will vote to override a third veto. A 132-0 vote should mean something.
And readers who rely on these services, or work for the groups that provide them, should tell the governor directly through her official contact form. New York asks its nonprofits to do the work first. The least it can do is pay on time.
Featured photo: The New York State Capitol in Albany. Photo by A.S. via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 public domain dedication. Cropped.
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