It is done
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- April
- 1
Technically, the state budget was completed at 11:09 a.m. Sunday, missing the midnight Saturday deadline.
But lawmakers sprinted out of the Capitol saying they felt they met the spirit of the deadline (it is Palm Sunday) and enacted a spending plan that allowed them to declare many
victories.
  “I don’t remember, really, having this much success,’’ said Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, Rensselaer County.
  The Republican got rookie Gov. Eliot Spitzer to significantly boost education aid, especially to GOP-dominated Long Island. He also won some restorations to Spitzer’s proposed Medicaid cuts. And he killed a Spitzer proposal to expand the nickel-deposit law on beverage containers and a proposal to form a prison-closure commission.
  “Did we do a great job for the people of this state? Yes, we did,’’ Bruno told his Senate colleagues as they voted on the final three bills of a $120.9 billion budget for a fiscal year that began midnight Saturday.
   The state Assembly had the last word. It finished off the final bill shortly after 11 a.m. on Palm Sunday, allowing the Legislature to depart for a two-week Easter-Passover break.
  Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said Spitzer achieved many fundamental shifts, such as changing the formulas for school aid and hospital and nursing home reimbursements to reflect need rather than historical geographical allocations.
 “The governor has had a tremendous set of victories here,’’ said Silver, D-Manhattan.
  Spitzer walked through the Assembly chamber as members filed out, congratulating Silver as the media surrounded them.
  “It’s a great budget that accomplished all sorts of things I set out,’’ the Democrat governor said. He added that his wins will stand out “when all the dust settles and the public looks around and sees everything’’ in the budget.     ÂÂÂ
This entry was posted
on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 12:50 pm by Yancey Roy.
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