Two men in a room

It’s
been tough enough for state lawmakers to agree on their budgets through
closed-door negotiations between three men in a room. Now imagine two men
arguing in a room and a third sitting in his executive chamber, moistening his
veto stamp in anticipation of nixing whatever compromise the two finally come
up with.

            That seems to be the situation in
Albany this year, and this communication breakdown couldn’t come at a worse
time. The state is facing a fiscal crisis “of a magnitude that we have not
faced in our lifetime,” Governor George Pataki admitted during his 2003
State of the State address. In an attempt to close a budget deficit estimated
to be as high as $11.5 billion, the governor has proposed $5.6 billion in cuts
to public education, health care, and state aid for higher education, among
other austerity measures.

            State legislators are unwilling to
accept the governor’s budget, but neither have they been able to agree on an
alternative spending plan. As has been the case for the past 18 years, the
governor and the legislature have missed the April 1 deadline for passing the
state budget this year.

            Actually, make that the governor,
Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, and Democratic Assembly Speaker
Sheldon Silver — the “three men in a room” whose private negotiating sessions
usually result in a budget compromise sometime in the spring. But this year,
“We’ve got two people in a room — not three, two,” stresses Democratic Assemblyman David Gantt.

            “Usually, the governor’s involved in
the [budget] negotiations,” says Democratic Assemblywoman Susan John, “and
that’s the reason why it takes so long to get an agreement, because we are
trying to get him to agree to stuff so he won’t veto it.”

            “What’s
different this year is that… he’s refusing to negotiate with us,” John says.

            That brings up the very real
possibility that the Dem-led Assembly and the Republican-controlled Senate will
agree on a spending plan, only to have it shot down by the governor. This could
further delay the budget process and cause more harm to school districts,
social service agencies, and hundreds of other organizations that need to know
how much state aid they’ll receive in order to properly plan their own budgets
this year.

            Anticipating a particularly long
state budget battle, the Assembly and Senate passed a measure that would have
given school districts more time to prepare their budgets before they must
present them to voters for approval this year. In an early indication of
Pataki’s unwillingness to compromise this time around, the governor vetoed that
bill. But the measure passed in both houses with near unanimous support, and
when the Senate and Assembly reconvene following their holiday recess, John
says they may vote to override Pataki’s veto.

Members of
Rochester’s state delegation say they’re hopeful the Assembly and
Senate will be able to craft a spending plan by the last weekend of April, and
vote on budget bills the following week.

            In mid-April, Bruno and Silver
announced that they’d agreed to push for $1.9 billion in restorations to cuts
proposed in Pataki’s budget. However, there are still a few key details to be
resolved, such as how the legislative leaders plan to come up with the money,
and exactly how it will be divvied up.

            Those are the budgetary issues
lawmakers are wrangling with during this break. When it gets down to specifics,
finding common ground between the Senate and the Assembly is “always a painful
process,” John says. “It is usually during that process that we discover that
things we thought we had agreements on, we didn’t have agreements on.”

            State Senator Joe Robach says he’s
been “on the phone continuously,” listening to his constituents’ concerns and
lobbying fellow legislators to make sure areas important to his district —
such as pre-kindergarten education and nursing homes — get the funding they
need. The holiday break “will be a full work week for me,” says Robach, and, he
adds, “I’m happy to do it.”

            Robach has
been a vocal critic of the state’s dysfunctional budget process, both during
his years as a Democratic Assemblyman and now in his first year as a Republican
Senator.

            While an assemblyman, Robach
introduced a fairly radical idea to reform the system: If the budget wasn’t
done by April 1, “the legislature and the governor, like a jury, would be
sequestered and be required to be working 45 hours a week, in Albany —
hopefully, on the budget,” Robach says. That is, lawmakers would be discouraged
from working on any legislation not related to the budget until a spending plan
was passed. That bill, which also would have mandated open discussion of
budgetary issues between Senate and Assembly committees, was never passed.

            The first piece of legislation the
Senate passed this year was a Robach-Bruno-sponsored bill crafted in a similar
vein. However, instead of mandating that lawmakers be sequestered, the bill
would have stipulated that if the budget wasn’t done by April 1, last year’s
budget would automatically be adopted. That bill didn’t succeed in the
Assembly, either.

            Robach chalks that up to political
ploys by the “downstate people” who control the Assembly (Speaker Silver, for
example, represents Manhattan). “They seem to want to focus on the idea that the
longer the budget [process] is, the more likely they are to get their way,”
Robach says.

            But at least one upstate member of
the Assembly, Susan John, sees it differently. As she points out, a law passed
several years ago stipulates that lawmakers do not receive their state salary
after April 1 until the budget is passed (once the budget passes, they receive
the checks held in the meantime).

            “So now I don’t get paid when the
budget’s not passed,” John says. “Has that gotten us a budget sooner the past few
years?”

            And then there’s the other thing
that gums up budget negotiations: principles.

            “There are things that are important
to our constituents,” John says, “and sometimes we are doing our job best when
we are advocating for the Rochester City School District, rather than agreeing
to the number that the governor’s put on the table.”

This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2003.