Meanwhile Back in Albany (v36)

Nathaniel Brooks/NY Times photo

Ah... late fall in New York.

The time when DPW folks and highway superintendents and mayors and county executives in my neck of the woods get to stop worrying (at least a little) about getting highway projects wrapped up, and start worrying (at least a little) about whether they've got enough road salt or sand to keep their roads safe through the winter, reminding people to shovel out fire hydrants in their neighborhood, and things like that. Our full-time legislators are back home in their districts, doing whatever it is they do when the Leg is not in session the second six months of the year.

And meanwhile, back in Albany, the wheels the Legislature set in motion continue to turn, with bills approved during our brief but spectacular legislative session making their way to the governor's desk for signature. Or not.

I recently saw reporting on auburnpub.com of a veto by our Sonofa Gov, Andrew Cuomo, on a bill that was unanimously approved by both the Assembly and the Senate. The bill would have provide much-needed help to those DPW folks and highway superintendents and mayors and county executives who have to manage their local budgets to pay for maintenance of state roads within their jurisdictions - at a rate that hasn't gone up since 1987.  It also would have tied the reimbursement rate to the urban Consumer Price Index, so that it would be increased incrementally as needed.

There are 38 local jurisdictions in New York that take care of this kind of maintenance; one of them, the city of Auburn, maintains over 197,000 square yards of arterial highways, receiving 85 cents per square yard, with a an additional dime tacked on for square yards on bridges. The law, had it not been vetoed, would have upped the non-bridge yardage reimbursement to $1.87 and to 20 cents for bridge yardage.

According to data supplied by the NY State Conference of Mayors, Auburn would receive slightly over $200,000 in additional funding; the same would be true for Syracuse, where I live. The total additional cost would be around $12.7 million. The lion's share - over $8M - would have gone to New York City.

However, in vetoing the legislation, Cuomo said that the bill didn't include a funding source, that it would "significantly increase expenditures" and that this kind of thing needs to be done during the budget process. I don't know about you, but I don't see this as a "significant" increase in a $175.5B budget. And yes, I understand that we do have a huge budget gap that is likely to get worse instead of better, even if Cuomo and the legislative leaders take steps to get spending under control.

While state residents may not necessarily feel the state's budget gap directly, municipalities that have to pay increasing costs to repair the state highways in their jurisdictions are almost certainly feeling the impact of the 1987 reimbursement rates on their budgets - and that's the kind of economics that trickles down to residents who have to pay the costs. This is exactly the kind of thing we should be paying for with our tax dollars.

Supporters of the bill vow to try again in the 2020 session, which starts up in January. I'd like to think that, in a state where we can make up for legislators not getting a raise for 20 years, we should be able to fix this reimbursement rate, which hasn't seen an increase in over 30.