As Gov. Kathy Hochul tries to expand New York’s ability to involuntarily commit the mentally ill, some lawmakers are saying not-so-fast.

The state’s mental health chief was on the hot seat Wednesday — tasked with defending Hochul’s plan to amend standards allowing health professionals more bandwidth to commit mentally ill people against their will.

“How do you think we avoid this from being a sweeping change, so we are saying: homelessness now equals you can be involuntarily committed?” asked State Sen. Samra Brouk, a Rochester Democrat who chairs the chamber’s Committee on Mental Health, during a legislative hearing analyzing the state budget in Albany.

“This is for a very small, select group of individuals who are at very substantial risk to physical harm because they are unable to take care of their daily needs,” Ann Marie Sullivan, commissioner of the NYS Office of Mental Health, said.

Changing involuntary commitment standards and expanding what’s known as Kendra’s Law are priorities for Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams.

Since 2022, mental health teams patrolling the subways have worked to connect the mentally ill with housing options. Freshman State Assemblyman Micah Lasher then helped Hochul’s budding plan when he worked for the governor’s office.

“I certainly think it’s one of the more difficult topics to engage on, because you do have these incredibly important questions of civil liberties and public safety at stake,” he told NY1 Wednesday.

Now, lawmakers are confronted with a spate of violent crimes that experts say began with a failure to treat mental illness.

“It’s more in the public experience. There’s been more incidents that people are concerned about, rightfully so, and we all recognize that something needs to be done. So, now it’s just a matter of getting together around the table and figuring out exactly what that is,” Queens Democrat Michael Gianaris, the State Senate Deputy Majority Leader, said.

Incidents include subway shovings that have led to serious injury or death, and even the high-profile trial and acquittal of Daniel Penny, who was charged with strangling a mentally ill man on the subway.

“I don’t think that anyone is talking about the obliteration of civil liberties. Any change that is on the table is going to be a thoughtful adjustment to the statute,” Lasher said.

But considerable concerns remain.

“Our workforce is suffering greatly. You know, we see it every day with our 30% turnover rate with our people, or just leaving for Amazon and, you know, McDonald’s and wherever, because they can make more money there,” Glenn Liebman, CEO of the Mental Health Association in New York, said.

“We always say that you have to be mission driven to work in our field, but mission driven doesn’t put food on the table. So we’ve got to really get some more funding in there and more investments in mental health,” Liebman added.

Liebman was the first director of Kendra’s Law in the early 2000s. It allows judges to mandate psychiatric evaluations in some circumstances.

“We saw a lot of counties saying, let’s look at all our alternatives,” he explained. “A: it’s stigmatizing for an individual to stand before a judge. B: it’s expensive to go through the court order process to get the psychiatrist, to get everything in place, so why don’t we look at alternatives to Kendra’s Law.”

The state is also spending $1 million to study assisted outpatient treatment — research that won’t be ready until 2026.

“What we do know from our outcomes that we look at is that AOT decreases incarcerations, it decreases hospitalizations, it decreases episodes of violence,” Sullivan said.