ALBANY – Gov. Kathy Hochul’s last-minute push to crack down on public mask-wearing seems to be on the skids in the state legislature as she makes virtually no effort to publicly advocate for the issue.
Hochul has been mum despite proposing a bill in the state budget that would allow people to be penalized for “masked harassment” for harassing or threatening someone or a group of people in public while wearing a face covering.
The proposal, which falls short of the ban that had been in place for decades pre-COVID-19, is effectively dead, state senators told The Post last week.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) also acknowledged only about half of Democrats in his chamber are on board with Hochul’s bill.
“Sometimes you try to build a better mousetrap. Maybe there’s a different way to try to tackle the mask issue, and we’re still trying to work on that,” Heastie said.
Despite calling for an outright ban last year amid a spate of antisemitic attacks, the policy was absent from Hochul’s state of the state priorities for the year — but was slipped into budget talks behind closed doors.
“This is one I decided to wait,” Hochul told reporters two weeks ago as talks were just beginning, saying her lack of public advocacy on the issue is a strategy.
“I have different strategies. You can look past years on issues that have come up later and have been successful.”
Hochul has taken a much different tack on her proposal to reform state laws governing how evidence is shared in criminal cases, sending district attorneys to stump for her pitch to reporters three days in a row this week.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and Queens DA Melinda Katz told reporters they agreed the state needs to crack down on people wearing masks for the sole purpose of avoiding detection by law enforcement, but avoided weighing in on Hochul’s mask proposal.
“I’ve seen in my practice everything from shootings to far less serious crimes, masking has subverted our ability to solve the crime,” Bragg said.
Katz said, “Individuals who are victims of those many times cannot get any justice because somebody’s hiding their face while they’re committing a crime.”
She then went a step further, arguing that prosecutors are put in a tough spot when trying to draw a line between when someone is protesting and when their speech could be characterized as a threat, thus invoking the proposed mask law.
“From the DA’s perspective, when we get involved, that has been extremely problematic for us,” Katz said.
During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Albany scrapped a decades-old ban on public mask-wearing that had been around for almost a hundred years out of concern it would run counter to public health orders.
The mask restriction bill was first proposed by Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz (D-Bronx) and state Sen. James Skoufis (D-Orange) last year but it has yet to make it out of committee in either chamber.
Proponents for reinstating the ban include the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League, but they’re facing resistance from groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union.
State budget negotiations are ongoing as Hochul and the legislature remain deadlocked on the other policy items Hochul is trying to shove into the spending plan.
Hochul and legislative leaders met Thursday for the first time since last Saturday, as rank-and-file lawmakers headed home for the weekend. They’re slated to return Tuesday after the current extension of funding to keep the state open expires.
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