Southampton Town plans to purchase oceanfront mansion to create public beach

New York education leaders and advocates are pushing Gov. Kathy Hochul to overhaul the state’s decades-old school aid formula in her budget proposal this month — a formula that currently would cut funding for hundreds of districts if not for a safety net policy.

The complex formula, known as Foundation Aid, was enacted in 2007-08 and is the single largest source of financial support for public schools in the state, sending billions of dollars to Nassau and Suffolk counties alone.

Parts of the formula are regularly updated, but others are frozen and haven’t kept up with rising costs, education leaders and advocates told NEWSDAY. The calculation also doesn’t consider the state’s 2% cap on property taxes, which limits how much districts can raise locally.

Keshia Clukey reports in NEWSDAY that a safety net policy, known as "hold harmless" or "save harmless," ensures districts that otherwise would see cuts under Foundation Aid receive at least as much as they did the previous year. More and more districts are relying on the policy, due largely to declining enrollment and rising income and property wealth, which reduce the state aid districts are eligible for according to the Foundation Aid formula. This school year, more than 56%, or 378, of the state’s 673 school districts fall under "save harmless," according to data from the Association of School Business Officials of New York.

On Long Island, 67 of the 121 school districts are on "save harmless" — including 42 in Suffolk County.

"The higher that number goes, the greater the risk is that you really don’t have a functioning formula," said Robert Lowry, deputy director for the New York State Council of School Superintendents. "Fewer and fewer districts are actually on the formula and thereby dependent on getting some sort of minimum percentage increase."

The state budget for 2025-26 guaranteed at least a 2% increase in aid for all districts and maintained the "save harmless" policy, but neither is guaranteed this year.

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New York State’s plans for scores of battery-energy storage plants by 2030 face new headwinds this year after another fire at an upstate battery plant in December, Suffolk County’s rejection of a variance for a proposed plant in Holtsville and the federal government’s freeze on wind-energy arrays designed to feed the batteries. Mark Harrington reports in NEWSDAY that developers who had planned large battery plants for Long Island had already faced waves of opposition from most Long Island towns with moratoriums on construction of the plants, following fires at three plants in New York State in 2023. One of those, in East Hampton, has been back in operation since summer after a devastating 30-hour fire that required a near complete reconstruction.

Proponents of the batteries, which are part of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s plan for a carbon-free grid by 2040, say battery-plant fires have been greatly reduced in recent years and new plants in the state are subject to strict new fire codes that went into effect this month. The codes mandate intense scrutiny of the plants’ designs, continuing inspections and faster emergency response plans.

The battery facilities planned for Long Island vary in size from less than an acre for a facility operating on Brookhaven Town land in Patchogue to more than six acres for the planned Holtsville plant. The plants feature row upon row of large storage containers, each filled with hundreds of thousands of AA-size lithium-ion batteries like those used in other electronic products. The batteries are used safely in countless rechargeable electronic products and utility storage systems, but improper use, poor design or damage can cause them to catch fire and, in the worst scenario, experience an extremely high temperature thermal runaway process that is exceedingly difficult to extinguish.

LIPA last year said it would defer to the state to...