“Promise, Promise, Promise, Promise, Promise…zero. Nada. Zilch. Nothing,”
Governor Andrew Cuomo in a late night press conference Tuesday evening was visibly frustrated when he expressed his displeasure with the latest federal stimulus bill that was passed in the Senate, which once again left out direct funding to the state.
“They again say, ‘Don’t worry, next bill is going to have state funding.’ You see it’s not politically sexy for them to fund the state,” Cuomo said about New York’s federal delegation.
“I can’t do a budget on don’t worry next time especially after that promise has been made and repeatedly broken.”
Cuomo says the state will be doing financial projections in a few days that will show the state will need to make major cuts to the budget, including funding to schools, local governments and health care.
“Now we’re in a position where we have to do a financial forecast, and we have to tell school districts, you should expect a significant cut.”
Schools say the 20% projected funding loss Cuomo mentioned on Monday, would mean layoffs and cuts to essential educational programs.
Cuomo also spoke about his meeting with President Donald Trump Tuesday afternoon, saying the President has agreed to work with the state in ramping up diagnostic and antibody tests to 40,000 each per day.
Cuomo said that he worked out an agreement with the President so that the federal government will help will supplying test kits from national manufactures, and in turn, Cuomo would work on deploying those tests and would manage the public/private labs in the state.
“It’s a smart resolution.”
Cuomo says testing still is the key to reopening the economy and making sure cases do not rise dramatically once things do start to ramp up.
Also, Cuomo addressed irregularities when it comes to coronavirus statistics in nursing homes. Right now there are multiple reports across the state that nursing homes are misrepresenting their coronavirus numbers and deaths.
“Nursing homes are private, we ask them for the information. They’re held liable for the veracity of the information they send. But again we don’t run specifically the nursing homes. So all we are doing is reporting private nursing home information they send to us, we give to you.”
However, the state is in charge of running inspections on these private nursing homes. Cuomo says he will be making an announcement about this on Wednesday.