For three years running, a bill that would force corporations to cut single-use plastic packaging by 30 percent and hand New York taxpayers an estimated 1.3 billion dollars in waste-disposal savings has had the votes to pass the Assembly. For three years running, Speaker Carl Heastie has refused to put it on the floor. This year he said the quiet part out loud: he is personally a yes, and it died anyway, two days before the session ended, after a lobbying blitz run in part by his own ex-roommate, a former top aide, and a woman New York Focus reports he has been romantically involved with.
The bill is the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act, carried in the Assembly by Deborah Glick and in the Senate by Pete Harckham as A1749 and S1464, according to NY State of Politics. It makes the companies that flood your apartment with clamshells, mailers, and pouches pay to deal with the waste instead of leaving the tab on your city tax bill, and it forces them to shrink that packaging 30 percent over 12 years. Beyond Plastics, the advocacy group founded by former EPA regional administrator Judith Enck, says the measure also bans 17 toxic chemicals plus PFAS and PVC from packaging and sets up a producer-paid fee system, which is why it has been called the most sweeping packaging law in the country.
The Senate already passed it. Twice. The upper chamber cleared it in 2024 and again on May 28, 2025, and the Assembly let the clock run out both times, per NY State of Politics. So the only thing standing between this bill and a vote, three years in a row, is the Assembly floor, which is Heastie’s to control.
The arithmetic does not back him up. The bill had 78 sponsors in the 150-seat Assembly. Passage takes 76. Heastie has said, on the record, “I’m a yes on the bill,” which makes 79, three votes clear of the line, as the New York Daily News editorial board laid out on June 4. Then, when reporters asked whether he would bring it to the floor, Heastie said “There’s not enough votes to pass the bill,” according to E&E News by POLITICO. The math says the votes exist. The Speaker says they don’t.
What changed between the sponsor list and the floor was not arithmetic. It was lobbying, and the people doing it. New York Focus reported that the bill died after a blitz led in part by people close to the Speaker. Three of them: Patrick Jenkins, Heastie’s longtime campaign adviser, close friend, and former college roommate, whose firm lobbied on the bill for the American Chemistry Council; LouAnn Ciccone, a former top Heastie aide whose firm reported lobbying Heastie’s staff on behalf of the American Beverage Association; and Rebecca Lamorte, a lobbyist New York Focus reports has been romantically involved with Heastie, who hosted a rally against the bill in late May, roughly a week before he declined to bring it to the floor. Lamorte’s firm, Brown and Weinraub, lobbied Heastie’s staff directly on the bill for the American Beverage Association and Eastman Chemical Company.
The money behind that blitz was not small. The American Chemistry Council, Jenkins’s client, spent 930,000 dollars lobbying against the bill in 2024 and another 797,000 dollars in 2025, plus a 250,000-dollar election ad campaign routed through a third-party committee, according to reporting by New York Focus that Beyond Plastics summarized. That same reporting found the Chemistry Council alone had nearly 30 lobbyists working the building, and that the bill was Albany’s most lobbied-on measure outside the state budget. The overall count was lopsided. Beyond Plastics counted 107 registered lobbyists working against the bill last year, deployed by companies including ExxonMobil, Shell, McDonald’s, Amazon, and Coca-Cola, against 23 lobbyists working for it, most of them nonprofits like NYPIRG and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Judith Enck put it bluntly after the session ended. “There was an avalanche of special interest opposition, and we were outgunned and outmaneuvered,” she said, per NY State of Politics, adding that “the physical presence of so many special interest lobbyists in the Assembly was striking.” The industry side frames it differently. Ken Pokalsky, a vice president at the Business Council of New York, told NY State of Politics the bill would “force companies to change their production processes, change the materials they use, and in some cases, go from cheaper materials to more expensive materials.” The fight is over who eats the cost of the plastic, the producers or you.
And you are paying now. A Beyond Plastics economic analysis released in April 2025 estimates the bill would save New Yorkers 1.3 billion dollars over its first decade, with New York City alone avoiding about 818 million dollars and Long Island about 142 million dollars in waste costs, because cutting packaging 30 percent means a city pays to collect and bury 30 percent less of it. A separate Beyond Plastics analysis found that nine communities including New York City, Buffalo, Syracuse, Hempstead, and Islip could see more than 411 million dollars a year in combined savings and revenue once the law is fully in effect, according to that group.
In the final week of session, Heastie was pushing something else: a constitutional amendment to let the Legislature gerrymander. On June 3, 2026, the Assembly and Senate gave first passage, on a party-line vote, to a measure that would remove the state Constitution’s existing prohibition on drawing districts to favor a party or an incumbent, allow mid-decade redistricting before the 2030 census, and drop the supermajority needed to adopt new maps to a simple majority, according to Redistricting Online. Analysts cited in that report project it could net Democrats two to four additional U.S. House seats in 2028. Heastie defended scrapping the anti-gerrymandering language by pointing at the rest of the country. “I think this thing about asking New York to play fair while everybody else is playing ruthless, I think it’s not right to ask us this,” he said, per City & State New York.
New York’s current congressional lines were not drawn by the Legislature. They were drawn by Jonathan Cervas, a neutral expert from Carnegie Mellon University, appointed as a court-ordered special master in 2022 after the state’s highest court struck down the Democratic-drawn maps as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander in Harkenrider v. Hochul, as 90.5 WESA reported. The amendment Heastie just advanced would erase the very rule that forced that outcome. Voters have weighed in on this before: they approved the independent redistricting commission in 2014 and rejected a 2021 amendment that would have changed that process, according to Ballotpedia.
The amendment is not law yet, and neither chamber can fast-track it past you. A constitutional amendment in New York has to pass a second time in 2027 by a newly elected Legislature before it goes to a statewide ballot, per Redistricting Online. The plastics bill, by contrast, never even got the up-or-down vote that would have put your Assembly member’s position on the record. If you want to know where yours stands, or you want PRRIA on the floor next session instead of dying in conference again, you can read the bill text and track its sponsors on the New York Senate’s official page for S1464 and contact your Assembly member through the chamber’s directory. The number that mattered was 76. The Speaker had 79. Make them show their hands.
Featured image: Marc A. Hermann / Metropolitan Transportation Authority, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
