Pet Peeve of the Day - April 1, 2009

Happy April Fool’s Day, New York – to celebrate, let’s pass a budget, shall we?

New York has the country’s most dysfunctional legislative body, according to the Brennan Center, and no matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to shake that label.

Reform is promised election cycle after election cycle, and never delivered. In the recent past the reason why we haven’t had reform, according to those who have not been reformers, is because the wrong party had too much control and nothing would get better until that changed. So, old world, there were three men in a room – the Governor and the leaders of the State Senate and Assembly – who came up with a budget, shoved it under everyone’s nose (almost always after the constitutionally-mandated April 1st effective date), and the two houses would vote. Conference committees would ensue and eventually we’d have something that at least remotely resembled a budget.

Fast forward to this year, when the three men are all of the same party, and presumably of the right party (since they’re not the same three men as before) and what happens? Last fall, our Accidental Governor told everyone we were in a crisis and hard decisions had to be made. In December, a harsh budget was put forward for consideration, but apparently not a lot, because in March, the three men go into a room and come up with a different budget, somewhere north of 2500 pages, and present it as a fait accompli, to be thumbs-up’d by the majority in both houses. Sadly, at about $132 million, it's even higher than the one proposed just a few months ago, it relies on short-term stimulus money to delay long-term solutions, and generally doesn’t do much at all to improve our desperate fiscal condition. Lots of fees, lots of taxes, and lots of nonsense.

There was no lack of chest-thumping by the Assembly leadership on their contributions, with sixteen or seventeen press releases in the past two days related to the budget – more than they issued in the entire moth of February. As expected, there’s no lack of squawking by the minority party including one of the locals. His tune on the process is very different now that he's on the short end of the stick.

What this all boils down to is just another version of Albany’s April Fool’s Day joke. It’s certainly not as funny as some of these, but it’s the one we have to live with. And it’s my PPOD for April 1, 2009.

Sue