Albany’s a wreck.
But
you knew that already. You’ve read countless articles and editorials about late
state budgets, high tax rates, and other problems.
What
you may not have read, though, is a comprehensive description of all those
problems — and why you should care about them — all in one place.
That’s
where a recently released book comes in. “The Politics of Decline,” written by
the Gannett News Service’s Albany bureau chief,
Jay Gallagher, fills that big-picture vacuum.
There
are probably few journalists as qualified to write such a book as Gallagher,
who’s been covering statehouse news and politics for more than two decades.
“There’s
no question that he’s one of the elder statesmen of the capitol press corps,”
says Michael Cooper, Albany bureau chief
for the New York Times. At press
conferences, Gallagher’s often first out of the box with tough questions, says
Cooper, and among reporters he’s known equally for his wisdom and common sense.
(He’s also known among capitol reporters for doing a mean Eliot Spitzer
impression at correspondents’ banquets.)
The
book had its genesis when Gallagher noticed two simultaneous trends: the
dysfunction in government — which he’d witnessed ever since arriving in Albany — was
steadily growing worse, even as the state’s economy did the same.
“It
occurred to me to look,” he says. “Is there a connection between those two
things?” There was, he found. Armed with that insight, Gallagher convinced
Henry Freeman, editor of Gannett’s Journal-News in Westchester (and head of
the oversight committee for the chain’s Albany bureau) to
let him spend a year writing the book. (Portions of the book took the form of
several series in New York’s Gannett
papers during the past two years.)
“I
thought if you kind of put it all together and let people sit down and read one
cohesive story about the way the whole thing works, it might have some impact
and maybe change things in the way that a newspaper story or a series of
newspaper stories really can’t,” says Gallagher.
The
book explores the depressing facts about the EmpireState’s slow fall
from glory and what that fall means to the average New Yorker. Of course, the
situation’s not all bad. There are signs of improvement, and there are good
things about the state that haven’t changed.
“It’s
much cheaper to live, if you discount taxes,” says Gallagher, “and it’s just a
more relaxed way to live, and real estate’s cheap.” Those cheap real-estate
costs plus the low cost of labor help attract businesses, like Rochester’s PaeTec. “So
we still have a lot of advantages,” says Gallagher.
If
there’s one theme that recurs in Gallagher’s assessment of the state’s
problems, it’s the power of ordinary people to correct them. Over and over during
a recent conversation with City Newspaper,
he fingered citizen apathy as one of the major barriers to substantive change.
What follows is an edited transcript of that discussion.
In the book’s
introduction, you pose the question: “What difference does this make to the
average New Yorker?’ The whole book is the answer to that question, but can you
give a quick synopsis? Why should New Yorkers care?
Because
if you don’t have a job, it’s harder to get one than it should be. If you do
have a job, it’s harder to advance. If you’re established in the community,
you’re paying higher taxes than you should. If you’re young and looking to get
going, it’s really hard to do it here. So it hits at the core of our economy.
And
of course jobs mean money, and whether you can stay close to your family or do
you have to move. It’s what generates wealth in the state. And to the extent we
make it harder to generate wealth, it affects all of our standards of living
and makes it harder for people to stay here. If you own a house, it means the
value is not appreciating as fast as it is in other places, so you have less
wealth. You’re just not living as well as you would if you were in a better-run
state.
Early on in
the book, you sketch a quick history of New York. For most of that history, we’ve been the dominant state.
That’s changed. Why did it take us so long to see the handwriting on the wall?
You’ve mentioned that other so-called rust-belt states were able to shift gears
much more quickly and come out a lot quicker.
Well,
I don’t think we’ve seen the handwriting on the wall yet. We haven’t come to
grips with it. The reason is that we pay less attention to what our state
government does in New York, I think,
than most other states. I point out that media coverage of the capital in New York is far less
than it is. There seems to be less appetite for it. We’re a big state, so on
the one hand, you have people in Rochester and Buffalo who really
are in more of a Midwest mindset than a New York mindset, and Albany seems like a
very distant place.
More
importantly, you have people downstate who think that the world revolves around
Manhattan and if it
doesn’t happen in the five boroughs or someplace close by, it doesn’t really
make any difference. So I think there’s more provincialism than in most places,
and therefore we put our state government under less scrutiny. So they get away
with more.
That
means that people with narrow interests — people like trial lawyers,
pharmaceutical companies, and some labor unions — their narrow interests
prevail more often than they should over what’s good for the state as a whole.
That happens over and over and over again.
What’s
wrong with New York?
You say that other state legislatures have long
since changed the rules system which gave the leaders so much power, and
divested that among committee chairs and other rank-and-file members. Why, if
everyone else has changed, are we still saddled with this three-men-in-a-room
kind of system, with Bruno and Silver running the legislature?
The
same reason the whole system doesn’t work well: because we haven’t — the
public hasn’t — demanded it. The important thing to remember is that the
system works for those on the inside. It works for those people currently
holding office, if you measure it by: Do they hang onto their jobs? And of
course we have, I think, one of the highest reelection rates of any legislature
in the country.
So
we have a system that works, from their perspective. There has to be some
reason to change it. And typically the reason to change it is public pressure
that demands that power be more diffuse. That movement hasn’t happened here
yet, I guess because we haven’t been paying enough attention.
In the section
about the governor, you wrote: “Pataki at almost every turn has limited the
amount of information flowing to the public about its government.” Post-9/11,
polls have shown that people seem more willing to accept government secrecy,
and it’s even trickled down to local levels. Can you explain the connection
between open government and good government?
Sure.
In the Pataki chapter, I talk about some specific examples. For instance, when
we went to Hungary with Pataki,
we were wondering, who’s paying for this? And they told us, it’s the
Hungarian-American Chamber of Commerce, hiding the fact that it was really
Philip Morris who was footing the bill. So here you have an example of a
tobacco company trying to block legislation to restrict smoking and that
information not being readily available.
Or
when the governor and his wife took a trip to the Bahamas, and he
wouldn’t tell us, or he wouldn’t provide documentation that he actually paid
for that trip. Accepting a gift of over 75 bucks is a crime. And the guy who’s
giving him this trip, it turns out he’s trying to get some money for state
support for his project in the Meadowlands from the Port Authority, which is
half controlled by the governor.
So
you have all these instances of people currying favor. It’s hard to separate
out what the government should be doing and what it is doing if we don’t have
adequate information about what it’s really up to. Giving up development rights
along the canal to an insider for $30,000: there’s an example. When it finally
did come out, it was blocked. But imagine giving away a precious resource of
the public like that for peanuts, because it was done in secret.
One
general criticism I make of Pataki is — I didn’t mean to make that chapter
the final word on whether he’s been a good governor or not, because that’s
beyond the scope of the book — but he hasn’t been much of a leader certainly
on changing the system. It’s hard to be an effective leader when you’re so
worried, when you don’t want to disclose very much.
It’s
almost a separate issue, except that what ties it together is they hesitate to
say anything, certainly anything controversial or anything even provocative.
And I think that’s a real flaw in his leadership style.
You devoted
chapters to Medicaid, education, pensions, and laws the unique to New York. If you had unlimited space, are there other large problems
or challenges that you would have written about?
Certainly
workers comp is another great issue right now. We have this incredibly
dysfunctional system that provides among the lowest benefits of any state in
the country, but it’s also among the most expensive. And we seem to be in a
position where almost everybody who looks at it agrees that this should be
changed, and yet there’s a political paralysis here that it just doesn’t happen.
Another
is: we’re not able to build power plants in New York right now
because a law that streamlined the regulatory process expired a couple of years
ago. And the legislature is totally unable to come up with a compromise to
extend it. So even though we are facing an energy shortage here probably in two
or three years, and the lag time between approving a plan and having it come
online is several years, we’re just doing nothing about it. It’s this idea that
we don’t have to deal with a problem until it’s an emergency. Yet in the case
of these power plants, it’s too late now. You can’t decide: okay, we’ll just
flip the switch and build some plants. It takes time.
Of
course another example of this kind of thinking is our debt: $48 billion
dollars. It was the highest of any state before Arnold Schwarzenegger had to
borrow $9 billion to bail out California, but it’s way
out of line with the rest of the country. And every year it takes several
billion dollars of taxpayer money just to pay the interest on the debt. So it’s
a huge overhang over the state’s finances, and it gets more serious every year.
But because it’s not an emergency, because we’re not paying attention to it,
because there’s not uproar about it, not much happens. It just continues to
build every year.
The
fix
About a year and a half ago, New York
University’s Brennan Center released its report calling the legislature the
“most dysfunctional” in America. Yet some of the good-government groups have
been saying similar things for years. Why did this one report seem to stick and
get some media coverage and generate a little outrage?
That’s
something I didn’t really expect. I thought when it came out, it would just
sink like most similar reports have. First of all, calling New York the “most
dysfunctional” was a real easy handle, real easy for people to understand and
to catch onto. Secondly, it was done by a place in the city, NYU, and therefore
it got more coverage than it would have if it was done by a think tank in Albany or Rochester or Buffalo or anywhere
else. And thirdly, I think it was some part of a series of things that
happened; the late budget 20 years in a row, taxes being increased in ’03, and
continuing economic problems. It came at a time when people were prepared to
believe that about the state. So it was well-timed, as it turned out.
You note that
League of Women Voters leader Barbara Bartoletti says campaign finance laws and
reapportionment are “the keys to maintaining the status quo.” Is that an
assessment you would agree with?
Yes.
Those are the two big things that need to happen, because the key is to have
competitive elections. When you have competitive races, the officeholders have
to be very concerned that they’ll lose their jobs. Therefore they ignore what’s
best for the public at their peril. They can’t be as cavalier about their
decisions as they have been, typically. And the key to competitive elections
are those two things: to have legitimate, fair districts and to have some kind
of level playing field in terms of resources that candidates spend. Those are
the two most important ways that incumbents maintain their power: by having
gerrymandered districts and by having way more resources than any challenger
does.
What will
change those two things, if anything?
The
same thing that led to some changes last year. If the public demands it and
screams loud enough, there will be a change. Especially if in the next round of
elections, a few incumbents lose to candidates who say, “This is what we have
to do: we have to make it fair; we have to have fairer elections; we have to
have a level playing field.”
If
that’s the key issue in a couple of close elections, that starts to get some
juice.
We’re
still a functioning democracy, so the public can still influence these things. They
haven’t had so much interest in the past, but that’s how it has to happen.
It
would have been good if the governor had mentioned something about either of
those things in his State of the State address. And he didn’t. He didn’t say
boo about reform. That’s a real bad sign in terms of any reforms happening this
year.
Crash
and burn?
Near the end of the book, you quote someone
from the Citizens Budget Commission in New York City saying the city’s legislative
and government reforms came about because of their fiscal crisis a few decades
back. Is that what it will take for the state, where we crash and burn before
we put the pieces back together?
It
could very well. In fact, that’s kind of what I’m worried about. That seems to
be the way a lot of governments operate: until there’s a crisis nothing
happens. But it just seems so dumb, when we know what’s wrong now and we can
reverse course almost immediately and not have to crash first. But right now, there’s
no indication that we’re going to reverse course.
Of
course, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Obviously, we’re going to have a
new governor in less than a year, and we’ll see if that makes any difference.
But there will still be the tough political choices. A lot of people give
Pataki credit in his first couple of years of making the tough choices of
cutting spending in Medicaid and welfare and cutting the state workforce but in
the process getting the state’s budget sort of under control.
And
yet at the end of his first two years, his poll numbers were abysmal. People
were talking about impeaching him. He was not a beloved figure by that time. So
he did what was sort of politically smart. He reversed course.
As
someone said to me this weekend, he sort of went native. He became a more
typical Albany politician.
And it made everything worse, but in the process he became far more popular,
and he was overwhelmingly reelected in 1998. So we’ll have to see if this next
governor has a similar learning curve or whether he can do something different.
What would you
tell average citizens who want to know what they can do to make a difference?
In
most communities, there are some groups who are agitating — more importantly,
just by raising your voice. I’m always surprised when I hear legislators say
they get 15 or 20 calls on an issue and that’s a lot. It doesn’t take that many
citizens who are outspoken and in contact with their legislators to make a
difference. I’d say: pay attention; be informed about what’s going on. And if
you don’t like it, then give your elected representatives an earful. That’s
what they’re there for.
And
the more they know you care about this stuff, the more likely they are to do
the right thing. I mean, I think that’s a basic part of our problem: we haven’t
done enough of that. And therefore, people have taken advantage of that.
This article appears in Jan 18-24, 2006.
