Special-interest groups were lining up to speak today during an Assembly Ways and Means Committee hearing on Governor Paterson’s proposed $2 billion in cuts to the state budget.

And when Brian McMahon, executive director of the state Economic Development Council, suggested that the state needs to cut back on the spending growth for schools, he got an earful from some Democratic lawmakers.

“In order to stop the exodus from upstate New York, we need an investment in, one, our infrastructure and two, our educational facilities,” said Assemblywoman Roann Destito, D-Rome.

“If we had an economy in upstate that was a little better up than it has been in the past few years, we might have been able to balance what is going on in the downstate economy, as related to the financial services market,” she continued.

McMahon said he wasn’t trying to suggest that schools get less money, just that the level of increases has become unsustainable.

“There needs to responsible, reasonable increases in education, but over the past several years there have been very significant increases,” he said, “and yes we need a good quality workforce, but it has to be balanced with what we can pay for.”

Still, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Denny Farrell, D-Manhattan, also knocked McMahon for suggesting a cut in state education spending.

“We have to spend more money for education,” he said. “It’s not something we are doing because we want to buy the Cadillac of education – notice I didn’t use a Lexus, I said a Cadillac – because we need to make sure we continue to educate.”

So if Paterson was looking for support in this group of Assembly members to cut school aid, it didn’t appear apparent.

Other speakers also knocked the governor’s cuts.

Shelly Nortz from the Coalition for the Homeless said “this is the most frightening period I have seen” in terms of people needing services and implored the panel to not cut aid to the poor.

She and other groups criticized Paterson for not taxing the wealthy through higher incomes taxes, but instead focusing on schools and programs that mostly affect the middle and lower class.

Ron Deutsch, executive director of New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness, warned that cutting programs and services will only lead to a further economic downturn.

“When you cut services to schools, to health care to non-profit organizations – services people rely on – you’re taking dollar for dollar out of the economy,” he testified.