Glick Plans Aggressive Legislative Push for Her Final Session in Albany
State Assembly member Deborah Glick, who represents Tribeca in Albany and plans to retire later this year, succeeded in passing two bills involving environmental regulation in the 2025 legislative session, which were signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul in December. As chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Environmental Conservation, Ms. Glick plans to propose more environmentally focused bills before she retires this year.
Of the two bills that became law at the end of 2025, one kicks off a four-year phased reduction in horseshoe crabs harvests, culminating in a full ban by 2029. Horseshoe crabs are a “keystone species” (meaning they have an outsized impact on the natural environment, compared to the size of their population) that have prowled the Earth’s oceans for almost half a billion years. But their numbers have dwindled in recent decades due to overharvesting. (It is the bad luck of horseshoe crabs to have blood that contains “limulus amebocyte lysate,” a chemical that is supremely sensitive to even the faintest trace of every conceivable kind of impurity. This makes their plasma – which is a rich shade of blue – better at testing medicines and surgical equipment for contaminants than any screening process yet devised by human ingenuity. It also means that their blood – which fetches $15,000 per quart – is almost as valuable as gold.) The only exception provided for in Ms. Glick’s bill is “a bona fide educational or research purpose as approved by the Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation.”
The other new law sponsored by Ms. Glick tightens regulations on the disposal of rechargeable batteries, which have been linked to a growing number of fires when improperly stored or discarded. “By keeping these batteries out of the solid waste stream and requiring manufacturers to participate in approved collection and recycling programs, this legislation takes a step toward reducing the risk of battery-related fires across the State,” she says.
A third bill sponsored by Ms. Glick that seemed poised to pass both houses of the Albany legislature last year would have reduced plastic packaging by imposing a surcharge on manufacturers. But, explains Tracy Jackson, Ms. Glick’s chief of staff, “although we were still hoping right up until the last night of session that we would be able to see that go to the floor for a vote, in the final weeks of session, the plastics industry spent an enormous amount of money spreading misinformation and they were able to undermine the broad support that we had built through the session.”
Ms. Glick plans to reintroduce this bill in the legislative session that began on January 7. “Micro- and nano-plastics are everywhere, even where there isn’t any manufacturing or any people,” she says, adding, “the City spends $450 million a year on landfills and the lifecycle of those facilities means they are within ten to 15 years of closing. Once the landfills are closed, it’ll cost us a lot more to ship somewhere else. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“So, I will continue to make passing the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act and the Bigger Better Bottle Bill my top priorities,” she says. (The second measure would impose a five-cent increase on the current bottle deposit program, and expand the range of covered beverages that require a deposit, such as coffees, teas, and sports drinks.)
Another environmental concern of Ms. Glick’s is the prevalence of PFAS (per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, also known as “forever chemicals”). “They never go away,” Ms. Glick explains. “We have them all in our bodies. They’re pernicious. They stay in the environment.”
One of Ms. Glick’s proposed laws that will be considered in the months ahead, the PFAS-Free Products bill, “will get them out of household goods. And the other is about personal care products, because it would be really nice if we weren’t schmearing this crap on ourselves.” The second bill is titled the Beauty Justice Act. “These measures will help ensure people are not needlessly exposed to PFAS forever chemicals and other harmful toxins as they cook, clean, and go about their daily lives,” Ms. Glick says.
On the housing front, Ms. Glick is leading a charge to expand eligibility for protections that help elders and the disabled with cost increases. “Programs like the Senior Citizen Rent Increase Exemption, the Disabled Rent Increase Exemption, the Senior Citizen Homeowners’ Exemption, and the Disabled Homeowners’ Exemption are essential in assisting senior and disabled New Yorkers to remain in their homes,” Ms. Glick says. “But the income cap for these programs has remained at $50,000 since 2014, which no longer reflects the realities of today’s cost of living.” Ms. Glick’s proposed new law would raise the eligibility threshold for these programs to $67,000, and tie future increases to the Consumer Price Index.