state

Genesee County Manager Jay Gsell told WBTA's Dan Fischer that the potentially drastic cuts being talked about by Gov. David Paterson at the state level should have only a "minimal" impact on the proposed county budget for next year. The governor's plan for cutting spending involves mostly reductions to proposed increases, which wouldn't interfere much with the county finances.

In other news, congratulations are in order for Ed Leising of Batavia who was recently awarded the 2008 Health and Humanitarian Award by the Jerome Foundation and the United Memorial Medical Center Foundation. Dan Fischer tells us that Leising was "recognized for his charity work as a member of the Batavia Rotary Club" and because of his volunteer work with the hospital and other organizations.

Police in Le Roy are looking for anyone with information about an apparent break in at the Little League concession stand in the village, according to WBTA. At some point over the past few nights, someone had forced open the door and got inside. Anyone with information should call (585) 768-2527.

Assemblyman Steve Hawley told WBTA's Dan Fischer that most of the $450 million that the state legislature recently agreed to cut from its spending are "un-spent member items, the so-called pork that legislators use to win points with their local constituents." (Quote from Fischer.)

A new Web site called See Through NY promises to deliver "a clearer view of how ... state and local tax dollars are spent" by quite literally connecting users with the state's financial tax data. Launched by the Empire Center for New York State Policy on Thursday, the site has already made quite a splash. When I visited it this morning, it took about ten minutes to load because the site traffic has been so overwhelming.

All visits to the site today come with this disclaimer:

Due to heavy traffic, SeeThroughNY is experiencing technical difficulties and may be performing slowly.  We apologize for this inconvenience and are taking every step to correct these issues as quickly as possible.

We anticipate full functionality by mid-day on Friday, if not sooner.

It's pretty simple to use the site. Say you want to find out about how much money a state employee earns. Click on the bright green Payrolls button, follow the links to search the state payroll database, and... Voila! Or, at least, it would be voila if the search wasn't "timed out" after every effort to browse the salaries of the legislative branch, for example.

You can do the same for information on Contracts and Expenditures — and the data seems comprehensive — when the site is working, that is.

An article from the Johnson News Service, published in today's Daily News goes a little more in depth, behind the scenes. Reporter Tom Wanamaker talks with several people, including a municipal journalist's best friend, Robert Freeman, the executive director of the state Committee on Open Government.

"Thirty years ago, 'high-tech' meant electric typewriters and carbon paper," Freeman told Wanamaker. Freeman went on to call the site a "treasure trove of information on how public money is spent."

Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the League of Women Voters of New York State, hopes the site will spark a "rich debate about how governments spend taxpayer money."

Just a thought: The timing for the site's launch seems almost too perfect considering the governor's recent announcement that the state will need to start cutting staff and services to avoid a complete fiscal meltdown. We can now see in the barest and most unforgiving of languages — mathematics — just how each and every person, project and contract stacks up. Is this a good thing? Or a bad thing?

I've liked Gov. David Paterson since the first time I saw him. He's erudite, knows his facts, and he's got a sense of humor and a capacity for reason that about every other politician in the state, and many across the country, lacks to a fault. I'm not well versed enough in the political scene to get much more into my appreciation than that. That is, I can't say with any real authority if he's doing well or poorly at his job, though I would cautiously lean towards the former.

Proof:

Now that the news is out that the state accrued another $1.4 billion in debt over the past 90 days, he's calling our legislators back to work. How could the state be $1.4 billion in debt? City Council President Charlie Mallow alluded to it some the other day, in a comment appended to our initial story about the impending fiscal crisis, when he said that there are simply far too many special interest groups hankering after a piece of the pie. What looms is a question that ought to have been asked a long time ago in this state: What are we spending our tax money on... really?

Assemblyman Steve Hawley, R-Batavia, told WBTA's Dan Fischer that the state need to perform more regular audits. Sounds good to me. Let's find out the gritty details of what money is going where.

Here are some details from Paterson's address last night, courtesy of the Buffalo News:

The state’s projected deficit for next year has swollen by another $1.4 billion in the last 90 days, Gov. David A. Paterson warned Tuesday during a statewide television address in which he summoned the State Legislature back next month for a rare, midsummer special session.

He issued the call for greater fiscal discipline just three months after he approved the current state budget, which provides for raising spending at twice the rate of inflation projected by state officials.

“New York’s families are already making the tough choices — New Yorkers are prioritizing spending every day,” Paterson said Tuesday in the five-minute address. “Now, your government is going to follow your lead. We are going to end legislative vacations and bring them back to Albany to reprioritize the way we manage New York State’s finances.”

So, he can talk a good game. But what now? What happens now?

Paterson did not offer specific ideas for controlling spending. Whether he will make such proposals before the Legislature returns Aug. 19 remained uncertain.

How aggressively the Legislature will cut spending also remained unclear. The special session will meet less than three months before all members are up for reelection.

If Paterson hoped legislative leaders would rush to his side to make serious cuts in the current budget, Tuesday evening must have been a disappointment.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat like the governor, went so far as to draw up a list of programs — the biggest items in the state budget — that should not be cut. It included education and health care, which, together, account for 63 percent of the budget.

First, I would be interested in knowing what accounts for the other 37 percent of the budget. Second, I would like to see how the education and health care funds are allocated.

The governor made no mention of education or health care. Nor did he discuss the state’s ballooning debt levels and other rapidly rising costs, such as pension and health care benefits for state workers.

The state’s worsening fiscal problems are twofold: spending that has risen 45 percent over five years to $122 billion in this year’s budget and a softening economy that is evaporating tax revenue to pay for these costly programs.

Despite the gloom, Paterson did not say whether he would consider layoffs or a hiring freeze. Under the current budget, the state work force is projected to add 1,400 positions to 201,000 workers.

But he did say that, in coming weeks, he will look at the size of the work force, which immediately raised red flags among some state worker unions.

Danny Donohue, president of the Civil Service Employees Association, the state government’s biggest union, called any talk of trimming the work force “a sham.”

“We will not stand by for knee-jerk political solutions that diminish our quality of life and create more misery,” said Donohue, whose union has major leverage with legislators, especially in an election year.

For the full story, see the article by Tom Precious.

WBTA's Dan Fischer reports this morning that Gov. David Paterson will "deliver an unprecedented special address" to announce that the state is in the worst fiscal crisis in three decades. The announcement is expected sometime this week, and the New York Post claims that Paterson will cite "plunging state revenues" as the reason for the crisis and the forthcoming cuts in state services and personnel.

He may also call a special session of the Legislature to propose reducing some of the record-high levels of spending that were approved as part of the state's new budget in April.

"The situation is worse than anyone realizes," said a source close to Paterson.

"The governor has said he's tired of the state going from deficit to deficit, spending like it has a credit card that never has to be paid, and that he's prepared to take action," the source said.

In the meantime, the New York Times reported earlier this year that state legislators were hankering after a 20 percent pay raise.

New York legislators are looking for a raise of as much as 22 percent, saying the $79,500 base salaries they earn are not enough.

But an examination of state records shows that most make considerably more than their base salary. With extra pay for chairmanships and other posts, they earn just over $90,000, on average, for what is widely considered a part-time job; the Legislature is in regular session for 63 days a year.

And more than a third earn more from outside employment, often as lawyers in their hometowns, but they are not required to disclose how much or from what clients.

Not long after, the New York Sun reported that state judges, now, were asking for a raise.

A state judge has ordered Governor Paterson and the Legislature to start paying him and his 1,180 fellow state jurists more money.

If each judge on the state bench received the $600,000 sought by the four plaintiffs, the state's taxpayers would be on the hook for more than $700 million. The order by Judge Edward Lehner of state Supreme Court in Manhattan appears to instruct the Senate and Assembly to pass a law upping judges' pay within 90 days, which could prove an impossibly fast time frame for slow-moving Albany.

What prompted the request?

Judges on the state's main trial court make $136,700 a year, plus benefits.

Even though salaries for New York state judges are close to the national average, the judges say that the cost of living in New York is higher, and they argue that federal judges and corporate lawyers are paid more.

New York's chief judge, Judith Kaye, filed a suit on behalf of the entire judiciary in April seeking a pay raise order of the type Judge Lehner issued yesterday. But yesterday's decision came in an earlier lawsuit filed jointly by four judges seeking more than $600,000 each. That money, the say, represents the cost-of-living increases that they haven't received over the years, plus interest.

As for your run-of-the-mill hourly worker, the median income in 2007 was about $25,000, and an employee who made no more than the minimum wage — $7.15 per hour — earned less than $15,000 and likely brought home barely more than $10,000.

The median wage paid to the 4.1 million hourly workers in the state was $12.03 last year, meaning that more than two million New Yorkers earned less than that, the report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed. That was about equal to the median national hourly wage of $11.95 — about $25,000 a year for a 40-hour work week.

See the article by Patrick McGeehan in the New York Times for the full story.

Check out WBTA for these and other stories:

• State Assemblyman Steve Hawley all but likens Governor David Paterson to a "dictator" and says the state is being run like a "monarchy" — listen to the audio clip from WBTA. Dan Fischer writes that Hawley criticized the governor for not doing more about property tax relief and "likened Paterson's directive on same sex marriage to Eliot Spitzer's failed policy on driver's licenses for illegal aliens." Hawley is paraphrased by Fischer as saying both moves were made without the input of the state legislature. I would be interested to hear more about how the two issues are related.
• City Hall released the agenda for the next meeting of the City Council to be held June 9. WBTA says the meeting is at 7:00pm, but the meeting actually begins at 6:30pm, according to the agenda. WBTA provides a link to download the information.
• Erie County legislator Kathy Konst will join the race for the Democratic nomination to run against Republican Christopher Lee for the 26th Disctrict Congressional Seat, soon to be vacated by the departure of Tom Reynolds. Democrats already have three other candidates looking for the party nod: Jack Davis, Alice Kryzan and Jon Powers.