Alliance Alert:The Alliance for Rights and Recovery applauds the NYS Legislature for rejecting Governor Hochul’s proposal to expand involuntary commitment in their one-house budget proposals. Instead, both chambers prioritized voluntary, community-based mental health services and included a 7.8% rate enhancement for mental health, substance use, and disability service agencies and their workforce.
We are also pleased to see funding for Daniel’s Law start up programs, which will launch mental health first responder teams with the goal of phasing in a statewide non-police crisis response system. The Assembly allocated $20 million for start-ups and $2 million for a technical assistance center, while the Senate set aside $22 million for start-up programs.
The proposed budgets also include funding for key Alliance priorities, such as Peer Bridger programs, Intensive and Sustained Engagement Teams (INSET), and Clubhouses. These services are crucial in providing peer support, continuous engagement, and community-based resources that facilitate recovery and integration.
We extend our gratitude to all who have contributed to our advocacy initiatives thus far. Your dedication has been instrumental in achieving these advancements, and we look forward to your ongoing partnership.
As budget negotiations between the Legislature and Governor’s Office intensify ahead of the April 1 deadline, your continued advocacy is critical. We must ensure the Legislature holds strong in negotiations and continues to reject expansions of involuntary treatment while including increased funding for agencies, workforce support, Daniel’s Law start-ups, and other needed voluntary services in the final budget.
Stay tuned for ways to get involved in the coming weeks! See below for recent article on the legislature’s one house budgets’ mental health provisions, which includes comments from the Alliance’s Harvey Rosenthal and NYCLU’s Beth Haroules.
Legislature Rejects Hochul’s Involuntary Commitment Push in Budget Proposals
By Ethan Geringer-Sameth | Crain’s Health Pulse | March 13, 2025
The state Senate and Assembly rejected Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal to loosen standards for involuntary commitment, setting the stage for another fight over a key plank of the governor’s mental health agenda in budget negotiations.
Both chambers’ budget proposals, released this week in response to Hochul’s $252 billion executive spending plan, omitted language the governor is seeking that would make it easier for police to detain and clinicians to hospitalize people deemed to have an untreated mental illness. The language would change self-danger definitions in state law to include the failure to address basic needs, making it easier for police to pick up unsheltered individuals when they don’t have food, clothing or access to medical care.
Clinicians can already consider a patient’s ability to meet those needs in determining whether to commit them following a 72-hour psychiatric hold in a hospital, said Beth Haroules, a lawyer with the New York Civil Liberties Union. Hochul’s proposal would change the law to allow non-clinicians, like police, to weigh that criteria when involuntarily removing people to a hospital over a suspected untreated mental illness, Haroules said.
“We understand that the people are rightfully concerned, and we are too, which is why we’ve invested, obviously, more in mental health,” Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins told reporters on Tuesday. “We just want to make sure that we get it right and it will be a broader conversation.”
Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, both Democrats, have said involuntary commitment and changes to the court discovery laws are likely to be key sticking points that they hope to negotiate outside of the budget.
Each year she’s occupied the governor’s mansion, Hochul has proposed expansions to the state’s standards governing involuntary mental health treatment among hospitals and community-based providers via the state budget. In the eleventh-hour of negotiations in 2022, she secured a change letting clinicians make remote assessments under Kendra’s Law, a statute that allows local jurisdictions to seek court-ordered mental health treatment in the community. But she hasn’t been able to codify the language to change the standards for when a person may be considered a danger to themselves.
The Senate and Assembly have placed a greater premium on funding for voluntary mental health alternatives. Both chambers included a 7.8% increase for community-based mental health, substance use and disability services to combat inflation, up from Hochul’s 2.1% increase. The Senate’s proposal takes aim at the health care workforce shortage, requiring that at least 4% of the increase go toward salary boosts for staff.
The chambers also included funding for non-police mental health crisis response programs under a statute known as Daniel’s Law, with the Senate pushing $22 million for those pilots and the Assembly vying for a $20 million earmark plus $2 million for a technical assistance center to provide support to program operators. The Legislature also included more modest funding increases for peer support and outreach teams beyond what Hochul proposed.
The houses of the Legislature typically propose bigger budgets than the governor, with the three leaders meeting somewhere in the middle on spending in the next fiscal year, which begins April 1. Hanging over budget negotiations this year is the fate of tens of billions of dollars in federal health and general aid that could be at risk under proposed funding cuts from Republicans in Washington.
Critics of involuntary treatment lauded legislative leaders for taking a different tack than Hochul but were careful not to celebrate before the legislative session’s ink has dried.
“The governor basically led with coercion,” said Harvey Rosenthal, CEO for the Alliance for Rights and Recovery, a mental health advocacy group that opposes involuntary treatment. “They didn’t jump.”