Shhh … Secrets Abound on Planet Albany

While New York legislators and Gov. David Paterson say the massive state budget will be ready for on-time approval by Tuesday, tension grew among lobbyists, good-government advocates and reporters trying to pierce the secretive process of how the state wants to spend your money.
    
It's all part of a concerted, cynical decision by leaders in Albany -- all of one party for the first time in decades -- to craft a budget in private with billions for special interests that fund their re-election campaigns, and the taxes for you to pay for it. Paterson and Democratic legislative leaders figured they'd rather take the hit on secrecy because it would more easily get them an on-time budget, all the public really pays attention to.
    
The secrecy gives lawmakers political cover for their decisions. For example, after the budget is adopted, your legislator will be able to deflect your criticism of raising a tax, saying they opposed the bad stuff, but it was all part of the overall budget, so what could they do?
    
And you'll never know if it's true.
    
It would be easier to let all this slide if the 2009-10 budget wasn't going to affect so many New Yorkers personally.
    
It may, for example, force more than 8,000 layoffs in schools as the New York State United Teachers union is claiming in a radio ad blitz. More likely, less state aid than schools expected could trigger 10 percent average increases in local school property taxes, as it did the last time schools saw a cut.
    
The budget may force huge health insurance premium increases on individuals because of reduced funding to the industry. It may close local hospitals, as the hospital lobby claims, because of shifting Medicaid funding to cheaper outpatient care. And Paterson says he expects the $16 billion deficit to grow by $3 billion by the end of the fiscal year and that he's nearly at the point of having to make “life threatening'' cuts in public health and other spending.
    
“It represents a real lack of leadership,'' said Elizabeth Lynam of the independent Citizens Budget Commission. “We're facing one of the most serious fiscal crises we've ever faced, and yet deals are being cut and everyone seems to think solving the problem only on the revenue side of the equation is the right way to go.''
    
That's where the all-but-final action to increase the income tax rate comes in. Proposals range from a graduated increase in the rate for New Yorkers making $300,000, $500,000 and $1 million or more a year to simpler increases starting at $250,000 a year or $500,000 a year.
    
“It's an easy populist approach that may spare them some political pain, but it has a price. We need our economy to recover, and it's going to make it that much tougher to recover,'' Lynam said.
    
The frustration was clear at Friday's press conference when one of the secretive deals was announced. Leaders agreed to roll back some of the last of the Rockefeller-era drug deals to help divert more nonviolent drug dealers and users into cheaper, more effective treatment rather than prison. Republicans who were completely shut out of the process tagged it the drug dealer protection act. Why such a big policy decision in the budget? Because it wasn't going to get approval in a vote on its own merits.
    
But the first question from a reporter at the announcement was to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, asking why the night before he directly denied there was a deal.
    
Silver said he wasn't lying, that details were still being worked out even after leaders left the building Thursday.
 
Meanwhile, the ornate Red Room was being readied for Friday's rare and orchestrated public announcement of a deal.
    
Paterson tried to laugh off the calls for greater transparency, telling reporters that he didn't see them opening up their own contract process to public view, apparently finding no difference between negotiating the use of tax dollars versus a private company's revenue. That drew loud rumblings of approval from several rank-and-file Democratic Assembly members who were themselves kept in the dark through most of the negotiations.
    
“The problem with a closed process is virtually no one knows what's going on,'' said Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group.
    
“The clampdown on information drives people crazy,'' said Horner. “This is supposed to be a democracy. They are supposed to be doing the public's work, and yet they are doing it in a way that prohibits public input. It's crazy and frustrating.''
    
And these are the people who promised to reform Albany.