From 40 feet up, everybody looks like a budget analyst or an out-of-towner.
The Manhattan Institute's conference on the state budget at the Grand Hyatt Hotel had just finished and I'd pulled a Roscoe P. Coltrane and let the guy I was supposed to be milking for information slip into an elevator without me.
Start the dueling Banjos. I hit the stairs in pursuit of the only guy who can explain the $101 billion state budget. And what's wrong with it.
My target, Edmund J. McMahon, is the Albany-based number cruncher for the Manhattan Institute.
Leaping over a velvet rope (hit the freeze frame, cue the voice over) I land on the marble floor, pull myself upright and scan the room. I spot him. He's heading for the train.
For years, E.J. has been drumming up noise about New York State's spending follies. Lately he's been keyed into a scandal that may prove worthy of Boss Hogg—New York's fast-rising pension costs, as the state's share of pension contributions is up more than $3 billion in the last five years, despite which "both Houses of the Legislature passed at least 46 bills increasing pension benefits" in the latest session, he noted, while "still in the legislative hopper are roughly 500 other pension-related measures with estimated fiscal impacts totaling [another] $5 billion…"
My editor wanted me to grab E.J.—a middle-aged guy over 6-feet tall—and squeeze a doomsday prediction out of him. E.J., though, is a wonk, not a fighter (sigh) and opts for polite discussion.
"Right now, if you had to simply shut down the government and put New York out of business [the state could] cover what it owes to every current retiree and every person currently working; we've been keeping current. Unlike the state of California, Illinois, New Jersey. They're actually behind. Not only are their pension bills rising, they've been behind all along."
So, no doom but plenty of gloom: "The city is going to spend literally billions more next year on pensions, than it was spending a few years ago… more than the NYPD costs—just on pensions."
The numbers starts sinking in and then he's gone. Hopped a train to Lake George to attend another conference. That one's not so much about the state's imminent fiscal crash, but about who gets to crash it, Bo or Luke. Excuse me—the governor or the legislature.
Currently, the governor proposes the initial budget, and the legislature can then either lower spending (nope) or add new funding (yep) that the governor can veto.
This works perfectly, except for spending increases that exceed inflation every year and a 20 year streak of late budgets, which finally came to an end this year, if only because the big three (Governor George Pataki, State Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno and Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver) agreed to just keep using the previous year's numbers until they got this year's budget resolved.
Silver and Bruno have proposed giving the legislature (themselves, that is) power to pass their own budget if the state misses the deadline, which they'd change to May 1 from April Fool's day. Naturally, they'd then have every incentive to miss May Day. As a balance against this power, they also want to create an independent budget office.
And as a balance against that balance they'd select the office's chairman.
They've offered this plan up in a way that befits New York State's long history of undemocratic elections (Pop Quiz: Why is the Assembly permanently Democratic and the Senate nearly as firmly Republican when both represent the voters of the same state)—a referendum on an issue so technical and boring that only those with a vested interest, hacks and the occasional wonk or jerk will bother to pull the lever.
It's a "solution" that makes the present boondoggle seem like good government 101.
"This is a strange, sort of schizophrenic approach to the problem," said Diana Fortuna of the Citizen's Budget Commission. If it were to pass, "the governor has all the cards before the first day of the fiscal year and the legislature has all the cards after that."
The irony, she pointed out, is that "The state [is] mandating on New York City an excellent budget process to balance the budget according to generally accepted accounting principles, reasonable debt limits and the like, but none of that does Albany enforce on itself."
She is just a catch phrase away from the mightiest form of political discourse: a phrase that can be slapped onto a bumper sticker, or chanted in a protest. There's still no comeback for "Hell No, We Won't Go" or "Make Love, Not War."
Fortuna, a numbers-cruncher with White House experience, assures me that she's not working on a slogan. And that's the problem. There are but six weeks before this complicated issue will be decided by the uncomplicated electorate.
Scott Levenson of the Advance Group, a political consulting firm working on the pro-Prop 1 campaign, isn't sure how this will play: "There's not much precedent [for this kind of campaign], especially in a year when the downstate turnout will be anomalously high compared to upstate because of the mayor's race. So there's really no model."
The Pro-Prop 1 team is full of names voters love: New York Public Interest Research Group, Common Cause/NY and the League of Women Voters/NY. E.J. and Fortuna's team sounds more like a group of evil mastermind societies—The Manhattan Institute, Citizens' Budget Commission and their ally, the Public Policy Institute of New York State, Inc.
All the gubernatorial candidates who piped up are, obviously, opposed to Silver and Bruno's boondoggle. (The Albany Affair might make a good bumper sticker.)
Critics of Prop 1 are optimistic. "If there was no campaigning, it would go down because the tendency is for the public to vote no, since they believe that more government rarely helps them," Mayor Koch told me. But there is campaigning on both sides of the issue. Finally, it will come down to which side can appeal to a handful of mayoral voters in a city so nuts it elected Koch three times—meaning anything can happen.
Right now Silver and Bruno have only one vote each in a referendum, same as a dumb-ass Dukes of Hazard-lover like yourself. Make yours count and cancel theirs.
