Eliot Spitzer, October 2, 2006
He’s considered a shoo-in. Way ahead in fundraising, way
ahead in the polls, he has held only a few debates
with his opponents. His critics — and even some of his supporters —
complain that he has spoken only in generalities, that his has been a “trust
me” campaign designed to sound tough but commit to little.
In a recent
interview in New York City, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer fleshed out
some of his stands on major issues of this year’s governor’s race.
Upstate New
York still has a lot to offer as a manufacturing center, he said, if obstacles
like energy costs can be overcome — and if Upstate is marketed properly. He
insisted that the state can both cut taxes and invest in its future. He called
the state’s 700-plus public authorities New York’s “hidden government,” and
said many of them can be either consolidated or eliminated. Major reform in
Albany is crucial, he said, and he thinks that in the wake of government’s
handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, the public is ready to pay
attention to the wonky issues of governance.
And yes, he
said he’s sure he can convince the state legislature to reform itself —
although, he said, by law, the major issue — gerrymandering state legislative
districts — will have to wait until after the 2010 Census.
Following
is an edited version of the interview with Spitzer.
Geoff Kelly: Most of
the state’s wealth and political influence is concentrated in and around New York City. What do you intend to do as governor to
put Upstate New
York in a
position to generate more wealth and exert greater influence in Albany?
Eliot Spitzer: First let me
state the obvious. It is the dominant issue facing any person who becomes the
governor of the state: How do you take the Upstate economy and revive it? The
western-tier economy is perhaps the most challenged in the state, in the sense
that it is where there is the greatest concentration of old industrial
structures that are facing the greatest competition as the economic winds are
shifting.
New
York City remains vibrant based on the service economy
and the influx of immigrant communities and new economic courses. The HudsonValley is benefiting from the
outflow and migration out of New York City;
as costs in the city rise, people move up into the HudsonValley and east on the Island.
The limitations downstate are infrastructure
limitations that we will have to invest in.
What
[economic revitalization Upstate] means is confronting head on, first, property
taxes, which is why I’ve said we must cut property taxes by $6 billion focused
on the middle class.
Second, we
have to invest in our downtown communities. If we’re going to draw new
businesses, new capital, to our downtowns, we have to make them vibrant, vital.
That means investing in housing, giving tax credits, confronting the brownfields issues that are keeping many potential
development sites off the horizon of those who are willing to invest the money.
We have
seen the suburbanization of America,
not just the Northeast. That suburbanization has hurt downtowns. We need to
bring people back to the downtowns.
What sort of jobs do
you think you can attract Upstate?
Some of it is high-value-added
manufacturing. The manufacturing that has remained is not, by and large, the
commodity manufacturing, it’s the high-value-added work, where on-time,
on-demand delivery is critical, and the quality of the work. We have a great
workforce, so we can still get those jobs there, if — and this is a big if
—if we generate low-cost energy, overcome the workers comp problem, which has
been a major impediment, and if we train the workers for the jobs that
[manufacturers] need.
Right now,
if you can imagine this, there are manufacturing jobs going begging in Upstate
New York because people haven’t gotten adequate training.
Back-office service sector: lot of good jobs there that we haven’t marketed
Upstate New York as being a great destination for. When Citigroup or Bank of
America wants to move a thousand back-office jobs from New
York City, say: Instead of going to Omaha,
Nebraska, let’s go to Syracuse,
Utica, Buffalo,
Lackawanna.
We can do
it. Those are good jobs, steady people. The outsourcing that had been a huge
tidal wave five years ago — to Bangalore
and the subcontinent — I think to a certain extent, that
has dissipated. Costs have gone up overseas; people are getting more sensitive
to the quality of service they get when they are actually talking to a domestic
person on the phone.
But how do you bring
those jobs Upstate? It’s not as if it’s a new problem.
A lot of it’s marketing. I had
breakfast with the CEOs of some of the largest corporations in the world in Manhattan;
a lot of them are headquartered here. I asked, “How many of you have thought
about locating jobs in Buffalo, Syracuse,
Rochester?”
They hadn’t. They think about moving them out of state. Nobody has gone to them
and said: “Do it. We’ll give you the tax incentives. Keep the jobs here.”
The hard
part isn’t the idea, it’s the execution. If nobody is there every day, picking
up the phone to these CEOs to say, “We want you to move the jobs that you want
to move somewhere else, move them [Upstate]” —it can be done. Look, Warren Buffett is moving a lot of Geico
jobs to Buffalo. He has a prior
connection, so he knows the city, but he’s not going to do it if he knows he’s
going to pay a huge penalty for doing it. He’s doing because he knows it makes
economic sense.
Both your Republican
and your Democratic opponents have said that fiscally you’re trying to have it
both ways: You want to cut property taxes by $6 billion while increasing
funding for numerous programs. How do you reconcile that?
We’re talking about $6 billion
over three years. It’s one and a half [billion], two, two and a half,
sequentially, targeted to middle-class taxpayers, as it should be. One of the
major [provisions] in the STAR plan, as implemented and as Mr. Faso’s plan is
structured, is that it doesn’t differentiate between a landowner who has an
income of a million dollars a year versus somebody who is struggling at
$60,000. My belief — this is a matter of equity, this is a matter of economic
growth — is you must target that middle-class taxpayer. We do that.
How do we
pay for it? It’s easy — well, it’s not easy. First, we’ll make the tough
decisions. Among those tough decisions are the $11 billion in budget savings
that we have highlighted, with specificity, over three years. Eleven pays for
six, leaves us five for the sort of investments that we need. One of the
reasons I don’t want to take all $11 billion and put it into the property-tax
cut is, you need money for infrastructure, you need money for schools, you need money for other investment areas as well.
It has been noted
that Governor Pataki is looking to reconfirm his appointments to a number of
influential public authorities, to extend their terms in order to stymie the
policies of his successor. That is to say, you.
There may be some trouble; we’ll
see. Despite what’s going on now with some individuals being reconfirmed and
their dates being extended, I think people have a generalized sense that when a
new governor is elected, that individual deserves to be in a position to select
the people he wants to be running these agencies and authorities. Because
people know that you can’t flout, you shouldn’t flout the electoral process
that way. I think we’ll succeed in getting new people in, without too much
ruffling and too much fighting.
The
authorities are the hidden government. That is where the decisions are made.
People don’t pay attention; it’s where the ugly stuff is done. And because
there’s no transparency, people get away with all sorts of bad stuff, whether
it’s ESDC cutting deals, whether it’s the MTA, whether it’s the Port Authority
or the Canal Corporation. Big to small, the problems are the same, and that is:
the wrong people have been put in charge. People have been put in charge based
on politics, friendships, contributions, rather than skill. That’s going to
change.
You know,
until Katrina and FEMA, talking about competence as an objective value was
mind-numbingly boring, and no one cared. Every time I tried to raise it, people
would say, “Nobody cares.” Since FEMA, I think, it has become a more tangible
and real-life virtue. People appreciate that knowing how to get the job done
matters.
There are
700-plus authorities. Many can be eliminated or consolidated. Different rules
would be imposed upon them in terms of transparency, ethics, how we get the
bidding done and the level of expertise that would be brought in.
After launching a
study of New York’s public authorities, State Comptroller Alan Hevesi allowed that his office’s resources were not equal
to the task.
And this is by design.
Historically, the authorities were created as a way — and this is ironic —
to separate decision-making from politics. In other words, if everything was
dependent on a legislature that we didn’t trust, and perhaps still don’t
necessarily, the ideas was to create decision makers who were outside that
purely political world and give them the capacity to make decisions.
What has
happened is now we’re getting the worst of both: Politics has invaded the
authorities; there’s the lack of transparency that has invaded them, so nobody
knows what they’re doing.
The authorities also
create separate public budgets.
It’s a way to get a lot of the
backdoor borrowing. We are going to consolidate the budgets. We are going to
handle deficits and borrowing the right way, which is to get voter approval,
use borrowing only when it’s appropriate: for capital expenditures, not for
operating costs.
It’s
usually an easy decision whether a project is appropriate for borrowing or not.
And then, if it’s appropriate for debt, say to the public: “Is this something
you want to spend money on?”
As attorney general,
you’ve made public shaming a weapon. What tactic can you use to convince the
legislature to change its ways, given the necessity to work with legislators in
order to realize your initiatives?
Here’s how you do it: You don’t
personalize things. There have been a lot of candidates who say, “He or she is
the enemy; he’s all that’s wrong with government.” Don’t personalize it. Talk
about the theory, talk about what we have to do. Both persuade and cajole. Say:
“Look, there’s a reason that the public is supporting these issues
overwhelmingly. Join us in this effort.” There are carrots and sticks, and you
use them.
Do you intend to
implement the recommendations of the Brennan Center’s 2004 report of New York
State government, and its follow-up report this year?
Their report crystallized a lot
of the thinking that’s out there in terms of the problems that we face. Whether
we’re 50 out of 50 [in a ranking of most dysfunctional state governments] or 48
out of 50 doesn’t matter. The dysfunction is real.
The
problems to a certain extent are the result of internal, legislatively
determined rules that only the legislature can reform. Therefore, the question
is how does the governor persuade them to reform? I think by leading by example
and by saying the people have spoken. And I hope the people speak. I hope to
win, and I hope to win by a sufficient margin that I can go to the legislature
and say, “This is a genuine statement on the part of the public that we need
reform.”
Reform
means empowering committee chairs, permitting committee chairs to hire their
own staff, which means there will be genuine hearings on bills. Permitting bills to reach the floor for votes so that we can have
genuine voting about the tough issues.
And member
items, which is perhaps a small manifestation. It’s a big number —
objectively, not in the context of the state budget — but it is symbolic of
all that’s wrong. And I’ve said that I won’t sign bills that allow member items
to be handed out in the dark. Budget them in the right way. A lot of the money
goes to good purposes, but do it the right way. Some of it clearly doesn’t; a
lot of it is wasted. But if the money is going to a good purpose, run it
through the budget process, so that it’s done properly.
Gerrymandering
— which is the root of the problem, and I would start there but for the fact
that we won’t draw new district lines until after the next census — has got
to end. Have lines drawn by nonpartisan individuals —whether it’s a panel of
judges, however you configure it; there are a lot of proposals out there — so
that the lines are not drawn to perpetuate incumbents and eliminate genuine
democracy.
Those are
all things that we will do. And I can’t wait till it happens.
Geoff Kelly is editor
of Artvoice, Buffalo‘s alternative newsweekly.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2006.
