Gov. Paterson repeats his threat to impose a budget if legislative leaders can't reach one by Monday.
View full sizeAssembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (center), D-Manhattan, walks to Gov. David Paterson's office at the Capitol on Tuesday with Dean Fuleihan (left), secretary of the Ways and Means Committee, and communications director Dan Weiller. ALBANY, N.Y. — Negotiations on New York’s budget that due was April 1 appeared to take a faltering step Tuesday despite a looming deadline for a historic clash between Gov. David Paterson and the Legislature.
The Senate’s Democratic leader missed the first closed-door leaders’ meeting on the budget, apparently not knowing it was called. Another session lasted just 40 minutes and ending without a deal. “There was no negotiation,” said Assembly Minority Leader Brian Kolb, a Finger Lakes Republican, after the closed-door session that uncharacteristically included the minority party leaders.
The lack of any agreement was surprising just days before Paterson’s stated Monday deadline for the Legislature to agree on a budget before he imposed one. “There is no deadline,” said Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat. “April 1 was the deadline.”
When reporters relayed that to Paterson, he paused, took a breath, then recalled a June 16 public leaders’ meeting. “I remember being in that room and I said to the leaders that if they don’t get this budget balanced by Monday, then I’m going to do it,” Paterson said. “Maybe somebody thinks I’m playing around. Maybe someone thinks this is a game. ... But let me just say: That budget is going to get passed Monday.”
Of the “sacred cows” such as school aid funding that the Legislature won’t touch, the Harlem Democrat threatened, “the cows are going to come home on Monday.”
Some elements of the budget that, so far, Paterson is forcing on lawmakers piecemeal as part of weekly emergency spending bills, are starting to become clearer. The big final pieces include:
• School aid, the biggest spending item still open in the budget, may be near agreement. The Assembly’s restoration of $600 million to Paterson’s proposed $1.4 billion — or 5 percent — cut in school aid appears to be gaining support. The Assembly’s plan would appear as added money to most schools, because most of the state’s 700 school districts outside the five biggest cities approved their own budgets in May. But it could help avoid some of the more than 2,000 layoffs now scheduled, a figure already dramatically reduced from the original estimate of 14,800 job cuts because of actions by New York City government and about 75 local school districts whose unions voluntarily reopened their contracts to save colleagues’ jobs.
“There’s a lot of momentum in the Legislature,” said Billy Easton of the Alliance for Quality Education, a powerful force for school aid. “But this is Albany and it is not done until it’s voted on.”
• Paterson’s proposal to cap the nation’s highest property taxes appears dead. He had wanted a 4-percent cap on annual growth of the taxes, but now he has fallen back to a 3-percent cap only on village, town and county taxes. That would exclude school taxes, which comprise about 65 percent of property taxes and are the fastest-growing piece, but Paterson isn’t even optimistic about getting that cap. The state School Boards Association, however, notes that part of any restoration in school aid could be directed to property tax relief, under one proposal.
• Cutting and delaying business tax credits. Employers are already hit with a scaled-down version of tax breaks to replace the long troubled Empire Zone program and lack of an extension of a Power for Jobs program that provides low-cost energy. Now many face a 50-percent cut in business tax credits over the next years to save money in the budget, although it could be recovered in three years.
Under the proposal, businesses that already made capital investments to clean up and redevelop polluted industrial sites called brownfields, or hired more workers, or invested in research and alternative energy would see a delay in their tax credits.
“Let’s call this what it really is, a $750 million tax increase over the next two years on New York businesses that are struggling to stay competitive and keep New Yorkers working,” said Kenneth Adams, CEO of The Business Council of New York State. “This says to businesses that economic development incentives offered by New York cannot be counted on.”
• Revising projected tax revenues upward, to improve the bottom line, a common end-of-session tactic to Albany to cut the budget.