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AARP New York Gears Up for 2027 Legislature
Funds for aging at home, crypto ATM regulation on agenda
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Carmen Outlaw-Mayoliz of Rochester knows the value of the special services available to older residents, such as her mother, 90-year-old Ana Quinones. It can mean omelets delivered by Meals on Wheels so Outlaw-Mayoliz doesn’t have to race over from work. It can mean home care aides instead of having to quit her job.
Quinones, nine years into an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, needs help with just about everything — although the family laughs that she can still swear proficiently in her native Spanish.
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Outlaw-Mayoliz, 61, skips dinners many nights to tag team with her sister on evening care, and she fills in on weekends when home care aides can’t be found. But having aides up to 60 hours a week has been a huge help compared with when she did it all by herself.
Advocating for help for family caregivers like Outlaw-Mayoliz is a priority for AARP New York during the 2027 state legislative session. The state office will be pushing for better coordination of benefits for older adults, to increase funding for home and community-services and for tougher regulation of cryptocurrency kiosks.
Now that Outlaw-Mayoliz has a caregiving aid for her mother, she can do her job, which involves running programs for older adults and youth at a Rochester community center. But other families still don’t have help. Some programs that allow older Americans to stay in their homes and communities instead of being pushed into institutional care have wait lists.
“It’s just a lot mentally and physically. I had to focus on the needs of caregiving for her, not the needs of loving her as my mom,” says Outlaw-Mayoliz.
Aging at Home
New York’s State Legislature convenes on Jan. 6, and advocates for older Americans are hoping for more money for home and community-based services.
Home and community services include home-delivered meals, rides to medical appointments and home care aides to help with daily needs.
A simple ride to a medical appointment can keep people from getting sicker and ending up in the hospital, says Ann Marie Cook, president and CEO of Lifespan of Greater Rochester, an aging services provider that helps Outlaw-Mayoliz’s family. Lifespan has 400 volunteers who provide a combined 22,000 rides per year. Her nonprofit gets federal, state and county money as well as donations. However, an increase in state funds would help reduce waiting lists.
As some federal benefits have gotten more difficult to qualify for, fewer people have pensions to rely on and demographics change, the wait list for help at home has grown, say Cook and Kristen McManus, advocacy director for AARP New York.
McManus is hoping the state will increase the budget for home and community-based services by $50 million.
A 2023 report by the New York State Office for the Aging showed that spending $15 million more on non-Medicaid home and community-based services saves the state $50 million in Medicaid costs.
“Increasing the funding will just go a long way towards getting older adults the help they need, getting caregivers the break that they need, and making it easier for older adults to age in their own home, which is where we know they want to be,” McManus says.
McManus also hopes the state will streamline applying for benefits. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), in her state of the state address this year, said a task force will consider creating a universal benefits application that would allow people to apply for as many services as they are eligible for in a single form.
“If you’re eligible for [multiple] benefits and the eligibility criteria is the same ... it should seem with the technological advances that we have, that you should just be able to apply once,” McManus says.
Cook says applications confuse and intimidate people. A centralized application would be a leap forward. “Boy, would that speed up the process so we could help even more people,” Cook says.
Foiling Criminals
AARP New York also is hoping to see a crackdown on cryptocurrency kiosks, which convert cash into digital currency like Bitcoin. Scammers use them because the transactions make it difficult for law enforcement to track and recover money.
Legislation sponsored by state Sen. James Sanders (D-Queens) and Assemblyman Clyde Vanel (D-Queens) would require fraud warning labels on the machines and limit an individual’s transactions at the kiosks to $1,000 daily and $10,000 monthly, aiming to minimize stolen funds. The proposal passed the state Senate last year but wasn’t voted on in the full Assembly.
McManus is optimistic that it will pass in the 2027 Assembly. Since 2023, according to AARP, at least 35 states have enacted laws regulating or banning crypto kiosks.
Crypto fraud losses for those 60 and older jumped from $1.65 billion nationally in 2023 to $4.35 billion in 2025, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Report.
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