FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Contact: alyssa@slingshotstrat.com, 347-992-5006; jeff@slingshotstrat.com, 267-441-2730
HIGHLIGHT: Alex Bores Delivers State of the District Address
Watch the address here.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Last week, State Assemblymember and NY-12 Congressional Candidate Alex Bores delivered his State of the District address to a packed house of constituents and supporters from across New York’s 73rd Assembly District.
The speech highlighted wins for the district and tackled pressing challenges, including housing affordability, childcare costs, and countering Washington's attacks on the services constituents, and all New Yorkers, depend on. Bores outlined how his legislative victories, from the RAISE Act to the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act to the Click to Cancel Act, have taken on powerful interests to deliver concrete results for New Yorkers. And he laid out an agenda for 2026 that includes the Digital Choice Act, measures to protect New Yorkers from predatory behavior by gambling apps, and the Uncap Justice Act. Throughout, he made the case that at a time when many have given up on government, he and New York are stepping up to prove it can work—by identifying and solving real problems, protecting people, and focusing on accountability and results.“We're at a breaking point, and every day brings a new assault on the institutions we depend on, from a president who thinks he's above the law, backed by oligarchs that think they can buy our democracy,” said Alex Bores. “But here in New York, we are proving something different. We're proving that government can work—not someday, but now.”
Watch the full address here. Some highlights from the speech:
- “AI is reshaping the work environment and the minds of our children. And many elected officials don't even know how it works. When you're facing 21st-century threats, a master's degree in computer science can make it a fair fight, and I've taken a lead here,” said Bores. “An example of that leadership is my Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, the RAISE Act. It requires the largest AI labs to publish safety plans and disclose serious incidents within 72 hours. It fines companies millions of dollars for non-compliance, and it establishes an office—now being renamed the Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity, and Trust, or DIGIT for short— to position New York at the forefront of responsible innovation. Regulations like this are common sense."
- “84% of New Yorkers support the RAISE Act, 80% of Americans want reasonable regulation of AI. And yet, there's a small minority that doesn't. Trump mega donors, venture capitalists, and AI executives did everything in their power to stop this bill,” said Bores. “They ran attack ads, they spam-texted many of you. President Trump drafted an executive order trying to preempt our bill specifically. They even made a $100 million super PAC to try to intimidate me and the governor from going forward with this bill. But we stayed strong, and we won. We passed the strongest AI safety law in the country, and we showed people everywhere that Trump and his mega donors can be beaten.”
- “New York currently ranks 47th out of 50 states in terms of reporting those hate crimes to the national database,” said Bores. “I drafted a bill requiring law enforcement agencies throughout the state to follow NYPD’s lead and report hate crimes to the FBI. But because we know enough to start fighting the problem, I've also secured a $70,000 grant for the Mayor's Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes. It was the first time this office has ever gotten a grant from the state legislature.”
- “True justice requires speedy trials. Sadly, we've not always lived up to that promise. Our courts remain horribly, horribly backlogged on both the criminal and civil sides. On the criminal side, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch noted last year that since 2018, there's been a 61% increase in people being arrested for burglary three times in the same year. Why is it taking so long to get them to a trial? One of the reasons, and probably the most frustrating reason, is that we just don't have enough judges,” said Bores. “That should be simple to solve because of a bill that I passed in 2023, there are now 20 new judges serving in New York. That being said, we weren't able to add any of those new state supreme justices here in Manhattan because of a limit in the state constitution that was put in in 1846 before b Altman, and last amended in the 1960s when caseloads were a. Third of what they are today. So I drafted the uncapped Justice Act to eliminate this cap. Pass it through our legislature once that's us celebrating, and this year, we'll get it on to November ballots. Justice delayed is justice denied, and with your help, we can eliminate this arcane roadblock and protect everyone's right to a speedy trial."
- “I see a district that organizes. I see neighbors that show up at community boards, town halls, at the polls, and on a random Thursday night to hear a 30-minute speech on the budget,” said Bores. “Government isn't a building. It isn't a faraway thing. It isn't a department store, and it certainly isn't me. Government is just the name we give to the things we choose to do together. We can choose to make our streets safer. We can choose to protect consumers. We can choose to take on AI oligarchs. We can choose to help our neighbors on their lowest days.”
- “How many of you have tried to cancel a subscription only to be sent through an endless maze of phone trees? It's infuriating, and that's why I passed a bill called Click to Cancel, requiring companies to make it just as easy to cancel as they do to sign up,” said Bores. “So if they want to give you a maze to sign up, they can give you a maze to cancel—but if they can take your credit card with one click, they better let you cancel with one click. Unfortunately, a similar federal rule from the Biden administration was just struck down in court. And so nationwide, people lost their protection—but because it's a law in New York, New York's protection remains. So while Washington is struggling, New York is stepping in to protect you.”
- “While AI carries risks, it's also a tool that can be used smartly to make government work better. I took the entire New York legal code, ran it through AI, and asked the AI to identify outdated and obsolete laws—and reviewed it with human beings because it made a few errors. But it did identify roughly 60 laws that should be repealed, zombie laws that are clogging up our system,” said Bores. “Some, while not enforced now, could be dangerous in the wrong hands. There's [a] law that gives the governor the power to require all non-citizens to register with her office every 24 hours. Yep, and if you fail, that can be punished by up to a year in jail. That law was written during the Red Scare of 1951, and is somehow still on the books…This year, we're not just going to get rid of those laws. We're actually going to set up a system to continually find and remove outdated laws.”
- “My parents are middle-class. They built a comfortable life here. They raised me, they raised my sister, and they still live in the neighborhood. But that's no longer possible for most families today. My wife's best friend from high school and her partner have literally the exact same jobs as my parents, a writer and a technical director. They live two hours outside the city and commute four hours a day. That is the affordability crisis in a nutshell—in one generation, from being able to afford a middle-class life in the city to having to live that far out and commute. I want my newborn son to be able to afford an apartment down the street from me, the same way that I can afford an apartment down the street from my parents. But that dream is slipping away, and the system is broken,” said Bores. “But the good news is we're starting to produce more. Office-to-residential conversions are in process and showing promising results. Right here in our district, we have three projects. The former Pfizer headquarters is becoming 1600 apartments, including 400 permanently affordable; 750 Third Avenue is becoming 639 apartments; and 135 East 57th is being converted to 350 apartments. That is over 2500 new units from conversions alone, more than 2 million square feet of housing delivered far quicker and far more environmentally friendly than it would be to build that from scratch.”
- “How many of you have ever tried to make a reservation at a popular restaurant only to find it booked for weeks, and then you walk by it, and you see a bunch of free tables available? That wasn't bad luck. It was bots that were gobbling up your reservation so that they could sell them off for profit on third-party marketplaces. I know that sounds bizarre, but that was the state of restaurants last year,” said Bores. “Automated bots that would make reservations, hold on to them, and then try to sell them on these third-party marketplaces, sometimes upwards of $1,200 just for the reservation. And if that reservation didn't get sold, they would just cancel it just before the reservation. That meant you couldn't go out and celebrate an important time with your family, the restaurant owner had an empty table, and the wait staff didn't get their tips. So guess what? I wrote the Restaurant Reservation Anti-Piracy Act, which banned these bots. And in a month after the law went into effect—one month after—no shows in New York City, restaurants went down 68%.”
- “Technology has made many things more easily accessible—but that includes some things that we maybe don't want easily accessible, like gambling. Gambling apps send push notifications designed to hook us,” said Bores. “And that's why I've introduced the push notification ban to put an end to the alerts engineered to trigger addictive behavior. And my betting limits act would make betting limits opt-out instead of opt-in, so consumers would have the exact same rights they do now. But just by having a shift to making the limit a default that you have to opt out of—research shows that that leads to a 3500% increase in people sticking to the limits and not falling into addictive gambling.”