ALBANY - The days of the state Capitol's "three men in a room" are over.
Senate Democratic Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, D-Yonkers, on Monday is set to be picked by her colleagues to be the majority leader of the chamber in January, making her the first woman and first black woman to lead a majority conference in the state Legislature.
Stewart-Cousins' ascension comes after the Democrats romped on Election Day, picking up eight seats in the 63-seat chamber and giving the party at least 39 votes.
Senate Democrats will have a remarkable 15 new members when the six-month legislative session begins in early January.
On Monday, the conference will meet in Albany to elect Stewart-Cousins as its leader.
When the new Legislature is seated in January, Stewart-Cousins will head a Senate conference with its most comfortable Democratic majority in decades. Republicans held the majority for most of the last century.
"We long ago understood that New York is a big state with regional needs," Stewart-Cousins told the USA Today Network's Albany Bureau earlier this month.
"In order to grow to be a majority, we need to have members from all parts of New York state and everybody has embraced that reality."
Albany has long been derided for having three men — the governor, the Assembly speaker and the Senate majority leader — negotiate state budgets and important legislation behind closed doors.
But Stewart-Cousins will break that barrier by being the first female leader, and she and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie are both black lawmakers who will add diversity to the powerful triumvirate.
Heastie, D-Bronx, was tapped as the first African-American speaker in 2015 after Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, resigned from the post amid corruption charges.
Stewart-Cousins faces challenges in the new position. She served as minority leader of the Senate since 2012.
Democrats held the Senate majority in 2009 and 2010, but the reign was marred by scandal and a leadership coup that gridlocked the Capitol for a month in June 2009.
But Stewart-Cousins has expressed optimism that those days are being the conference because it has many new members and a stronger focus.
Indeed, this will be the first time during Gov. Andrew Cuomo's eight years in office that he will have a Democratic majority in the Legislature to work with.
Democrats have pledged a series of issues they want to take up early next year.
Those include stronger abortion rights and new gun-control laws, as well as election reforms and tighter limits on campaign contributions.
Stewart-Cousins already vowed the conference wont seek new taxes, even as some members want the state to spend heavily on a single payer health-care system.
"We will take an intelligent and inclusive approach to the issues that are facing us in order to find the right solution," she said.