State Senator Pat Fahy is beginning her first term in the Senate with some good news for her home city of Albany: Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed spending $400 million to revitalize New York’s capital as part of the State of the State agenda.

“There’s no way to describe it other than jaw-dropping,” she said. “We overuse the word transformative, but it is this type of investment that can truly be the game-changer that we need in downtown Albany.”

The proposal includes $200 million for "tangible strategies.” That includes public safety initiatives, specifically a state police presence in key corridors of the city.

Like many cities, Albany has struggled with public safety and mental health issues in the wake of the pandemic, and Albany County Executive Dan McCoy stressed that people need to feel that things are getting better on that front for the city to truly thrive.

“You can have all the data and analytics you want and tell people crime is down, but people need to feel crime is down. They want to feel safe,” he said.

Linked with existing state-led efforts to reimagine I-787 along the Hudson River and the Livingston Avenue Bridge Project, the money would also be used to try to spur downtown development. Hochul’s proposal lists “revitalizing vacant or dated anchor institutions, reinvigorating commercial corridors, and repurposing vacant and underutilized commercial buildings for housing and other new uses,” as priorities, along with maximizing the use of open space.

Downtown Albany has historically been reliant on state workers given its proximity to the Capitol and Empire State Plaza. Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan told Spectrum News 1 that the area has not been the same since remote work started during the pandemic and took a chunk of downtown’s foot traffic with it. She hopes the funding will help the city find other ways to bring it back.

“It’s about coming together as a community and making the investments to ensure we are driving more feet, more opportunity for people to come and engage downtown, and really come back,” she said.

Also on the table is $150 million on top of an existing $10 million effort to revamp the state museum at the Empire State Plaza, a project Fahy has been working on for years.

Efforts to revitalize the museum, which Fahy described as “stale,” have been in the works for years, but have been slow to materialize as decades-old exhibits remain stagnant and a proposed children’s museum on the facility’s underutilized fourth floor remains a dream.

She said the state’s cultural institutions like the museum and state archives have at times fallen through the cracks. She described them as “buried organizationally” as the state Education Department is forced to juggle those efforts with supervising the state’s public schools. Last year, Fahy proposed legislation that would create an oversight body for the museum to mirror a similar unit that exists for the archives.

“The commissioner is working with us, she appointed a project manager to really turn around the museum, and that was just with $10 million, so the idea now of a $150 million infusion, it really changes the whole nature,” she said.

The proposal will have to survive budget negotiations and Fahy acknowledged her role in that process will involve selling fellow lawmakers on the idea of giving $400 million to a city they don’t represent. Fahy argued cities like Buffalo and Syracuse have had the state’s help as they work to revitalize.

“We are making some critical investments along the I-90 corridor in other upstate cities that are really going to turn a page for what are otherwise considered old industrial cities,” she said.

It remains unclear if recent proposals for a soccer stadium or a transit hub in a mostly vacant "parking lot" district will be part of the governor’s plan, but based on her proposal, it appears they would have to beat out other ideas in a community roundtable process.