AGA Today

Budget Reform Pact Augurs a More Transparent Albany

 By MICHAEL COOPER

The New York Times

ALBANY, Jan. 16 — It sounds logical enough: New York State should be required to pass balanced budgets. The budget should not include blank checks to state officials, in the form of giant lump sums to be divvied up later in secret. And lawmakers should have to explain the fiscal impact of the changes they make to the budget.

It has not been standard practice in Albany, though. So when Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the leaders of the Legislature announced Tuesday that they had agreed to legislation to do those things and more, they described them as “sweeping reforms” for the state’s budget process.

“It will ensure both timeliness, and that the budget is balanced,” Governor Spitzer said, standing with Legislative leaders of both parties. “It will ensure transparency, which, above all, is what we’ve been aspiring for, and it will address many of the issues that for years have seemed to be beyond the reach of bipartisan agreement.”

Under the agreement, each budget will no longer contain a lump sum of $200 million to be divided up later by the governor and lawmakers as “member items,” allowing lawmakers to finance pet projects in their districts. Lawmakers agreed to list each member item in the budget — making it public, and subject to the governor’s line-item veto. It essentially returns the process to what it was until the late 1990s.

The agreement also calls for the governor and the Legislature to defer to the state comptroller when they cannot agree on how much revenue the state can expect to collect, and therefore how much will be available for spending, by March 1 — a sticking point that often held up state budgets in the past. It also requires the governor to explain in plain language the budget’s impact on local governments; calls for the Legislature to use conference committees to try to resolve its differences, and increases the state’s “rainy-day fund” to cushion future fiscal downturns.

But it does not do several things that lawmakers and others have advocated in recent years, including delaying the start of the state’s fiscal year, now April 1, which is before all income taxes are collected; setting up an independent budget office to make revenue projections; or requiring the state to use generally accepted accounting practices.

And it does not resolve a constitutional battle over budget powers that has been brewing for several years. The Legislature has already begun the process of passing a constitutional amendment to prevent the governor from using budget bills — which lawmakers have little power to amend — to make changes in other laws. Governor Spitzer has spoken about restoring some of the Legislature’s powers in the budget process.

Senator Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader of the State Senate, said that his house would continue working to pass the amendment, but a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democratic ally of the governor, said that the Assembly would confer before deciding whether to move forward.

Governor Spitzer said that under the agreement, the Legislature will be required to pass a balanced budget each year — unlike the current law, which merely requires the governor to propose a balanced budget. In recent years the Legislature has always said that it passed balanced budgets, but Gov. George E. Pataki often disagreed.

If there was bipartisan support for the budget changes, a fierce partisan battle broke out over a proposal to change the rules to make the State Senate more open. Senate Democrats, who wield little power, proposed that Democrats get the same staff resources and member item money as Republicans, and said that all votes on the Senate floor should be recorded — ending the practice of using unrecorded group “voice votes.”

When the Democratic proposal appeared to die on a voice vote, Senator Thomas K. Duane of Manhattan called for a slow roll call vote, which would leave a record of Republican senators voting against a package presented as reforms. Republican senators said that slow roll calls were not allowed, leading to a flurry of appeals and counter appeals that left the house in a standoff lasting into the evening, just as some Republican lawmakers were eager to get away to fund-raisers that they were holding. In the end, they compromised and used a show of hands. The Democrats lost.