The State budget was officially late, but has passed both houses of the legislature. Governor Andrew Cuomo does not need to sign the spending plan, which takes effect immediately. State house reporter Zack Fink has the story about a late night of voting in Albany.

The debate in the State Senate began late on Thursday and continued through the night into early Friday morning. Some of the most contentious moments came over legislation that raises the state's minimum wage to $15 an hour in some parts of the state, including New York City.

"Yeah we got resistance, because it's real life. These are people who went back and listened to their not for profits, chambers of commerce, thier hospitals, nursing homes. We took a proposal and I think make it significantly better. We got a billion dollar tax cut to go with it," said State Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan.

While some Senate Republicans threatened to vote against the increase, when the bill finally came to the floor on Friday morning, every elected senate Republican voted for it.

"We'd like to have a Republican majority next year, and to do that, we have to stick together on our campaigns and stick together on what we believe is the best for this unit to stay together," said State Senator John DeFrancisco of Syracuse.

Governor Cuomo had spent the last month campaigning for a $15 minimum wage in all of the state. He ended up with a compromise package with no guarantee of reaching $15 in upstate New York.

"I think this is a proposal that can pass," Cuomo said Thursday. "Which by definition makes it a better proposal. You can argue in an academic reality, I would have liked to have done it the way I proposed to do it."

Cost shifts from the state to the city on Medicaid and the City University system were taken out of the budget on Speaker Carl Heastie's insistence.

"Yes, I do have a great relationship with the Mayor," Heastie said. "But he is in some regards irrelevant because these kind of cuts would have faced the same opposition from Assembly Democrats whether it was Michael Bloomberg or Rudy Giuliani."

All told this budget is $147 billion. This was certainly one of the more contentious budgets in recent memory, but it's also one of the most significant ones in terms of policy.