Politics on the Hudson

Hundreds of correction officers traveled to the Capitol today to urge lawmakers to reject a plan by Gov. David Paterson to cut about 2,000 of their jobs.

Instead, officials of their union said, the department should cut administrators to save money.

“It is extremely disturbing to NYSCOPBA that those charged with developing plans to instittue saving measures refuse to look in the mirror when making those decisions,’‘  union President Donn Rowe told a group of Republican Assembly members, many of whom represent areas where prisons are located.

The union, the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, wants the department to slash some of the hundreds of administrative staff who work at the department’s headquarters in Albany, eliminate some of the 53 deputy-commissioner jobs and other administrators at the state’s 69 prisons. The union says the salaries of the Albany workers alone amount to more than $56 million a year.

There was no immediate response from Commissioner Brian Fischer. But the department has said in the past that jobs can be cut because the number or inmates has dropped from about 71,000 to about 60,000 over the last decade. The union maintains that the prisons are still filled beyond capacity.

The job cuts are supposed to take effect by July 1.

The Assembly this evening approved a bill to make it easier to consolidate local governments. The vote was 118-26. It now goes to the Senate, where action is expected later this week.

The adoption is a big win for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who proposed the plan. It’s considered a major plank in the platform of his still-unannounced campaign for governor next year.

The measure, which was sold in part as a way to control property taxes, will allow citizens to petition to abolish special districts, towns, villages or other units, and also remove some roadblocks for local officials who want to consolidate operations. The state now has more than 10,000 local governments, according to Cuomo’s count.

Those opposed to the bill said they doubt it will save much money and fear that the threat of consolidation would be used as a weapon in political disputes.

Democrats in both the Senate and Assembly appear likely to split over a measure to require farmers to pay their workers overtime.

The Senate Labor Committee is expected to approve the measure this morning.  Then later Senate Ag Committee Chairman Darrel Aubertine, D-Watertown, is slated to be part of a press conference attacking the move, along with his Assembly counterpart, William Magee, D-Nelson, Madison County.

“If this bill goes through, it will be catastrophic for farmers,’’ said Farm Bureau spokesman Peter Gregg.

As of now, the Assembly is expected to approve the bill later this week, with action in the Senate likely next week. Advocates say there’s no reason to treat farm workers any differently from others who get extra pay when they work more than 40 hours a week.

The anticipated increase in taxpayer subsidies to the state pension system will mean an average property-tax increase of 10 percent or more by 2011 in most cities, the head of the state Conference of Mayor said today.

“The bigger the city, the more public-safety expenses, the higher those percentages will be,’’ said conference executive director Peter Baynes.

Comptroller Tom DiNapoli announced earlier today that an increase in pension contributions  from taxpayers by almost 50 percent may be needed starting in 2011 because of record investment losses by the pension fund’s investments last year.

The value of assets held by the state pension fund plunged 26 percent last year, to $109.9 billion, Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said today.

The drop will mean higher contributions from taxpayers will be needed in 2011 to keep paying pension benefits to retirees of state and local governments, he said.

He attributed the drop to the international economic downturn.

“Like everyone who has seen the value of their investments decline, we’ve felt the weight of the global economic crisis,’’ he said.

How dysfunctional and combative is the Senate?

“You couldn’t get two-thirds of them to agree on what was even if there was only one clock in the room,’’ E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center, a conservative think tank, opined today on Talk-1300 radio in Albany this morning.

Republicans and Democrats have been remarkably consistent in voting along party lines all year on controversial issues, since the Dems took a 32-30 majority in last year’s elections, ending a string of Republican control that stretched back all the way to 1938, with the sole exception of 1966.

The changed control has meant more clout for Westchester, where four of the five senators are Democrats. But Rockland and Putnam, which are represented by Republicans, lost influence.

June is normally the time when thoughts of many people turn to proms, the end of school, summer vacations, pennant races and barbeques.

But this year, New Yorkers may have to focus on their wallets a little more than usual.

A host of new taxes passed as part of the state budget and then, for people in the Hudson Valley, last month as part of a plan to bail out the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, take effect on Monday, June 1.

They range from higher levies on auto insurance to Internet purchases and car and limo rentals.

The biggest hit was scheduled to be a new nickel deposit requirement on water bottles, but a state Supreme Court judge this week put off the effective date, saying that bottlers weren’t given enough time to work out the details of the new program. So for now, the only containers that require the deposits are beer and soda bottles and cans.

The biggest tax hike, on the incomes of the wealthy, is retroactive to the first of the year. Overall, lawmakers and Gov. David Paterson agreed to increase taxes and fees by about $8 billion to help close a budget gap.

Andrew Cuomo’s bill on government consolidation hit a snag today when three senators refused to back it in a committee meeting.

Cuomo’s proposal, likely to be voted on by both houses of the Legislature next week, would make it easier for local governments and citizens to merge and abolish towns, villages, special districts and other government organizations.  Cuomo says taxpayers could save millions by cutting the number, which is now in excess of 10,000.

But Sen. Suzi Oppenheimer, D-Mamaroneck, said she’s worried the bill might make it too easy to put the matter on the ballot- Cuomo’s bill would require just 10 percent of voters to sign a petition – and doesn’t require a detailed plan before the vote. She also said she doubts much money would be saved.

“This could cause some serious disruptions,’’ she said.

Sen. Tom Morahan, R-New City,   voiced similar reservations.

“What are the savings? I’d like to see some numbers,’’ he said.

The two suburban lawmakers, along with Sen. Craig Johnson, D-Nassau County, voted “without recommendation’’ to pass it out of the Local Government Committee. Five other lawmakers, including committee chair Andrea Stewart-Cousins, D-Yonkers, voted yes.

Oppenheimer said she plans to talk to Cuomo aides to try to work out their differences.

Gov. David Paterson and legislative leaders agreed today to temporarily extend a key energy-subsidy program for businesses, but couldn’t come up with a consensus on how to permanently reform it.
The leaders all pledged to work to renew the Power for Jobs program that sends low-cost hydropower to businesses that pledge to maintain or expand jobs.
The program has run into trouble in recent years because as energy rates in the state have increased, demand for the low-coast power that is generated by the state Power Authority has increased.
But there is more demand for the power than there is supply, in part because some of it is also used to hold down residential power rates of the three major upstate utilities: National Grid, New York State Gas and Electric and Rochester Gas and Electric Corp.
“We all know there needs to be an extension,’’ Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith, D-Queens, said today at a meeting of Paterson and the leaders. “We can extend it for a year, and then come up with a longer term solution.’’
Business groups have complained for years that annual extensions of the program are bad for businesses because they can’t make long-term plans. Still, a short-term extension is far preferable to letting it lapse when the current authorization expires at the end of June, said Brian Sampson, executive director of Unshackle Upstate, an organization of upstate manufacturers and other businesses.

Gov. Paterson and minority lawmakers today reveled in President Obama’s  nomination  of Bronx native Sonia Sotomayor to be a Supreme Court justice. If confirmed by the Senate, she would be the first Latina and only the third woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.  Sotomayor, 54, whose parents moved to New York City from Puerto Rico during World War II, now sits on a federal appeals court in Manhattan.

“This is a great day. We are proud of her and look forward to working with her,’’ Paterson said in apparently passable Spanish (later translated for a mono-lingual reporter by an aide), as lawmakers cheered.

Paterson also recalled that when he was 12,  his father shouted to his mother that President Johnson had nominated “somebody that sounded like Theodore Marshall’’ to the Supreme Court.

It was actually Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the high court.

“I hadn’t seen them so happy since the day my brother was born,’’ he said.

The nomination of Sotomayor shows “any child in this country can grow up to be whatever they want,’’ said New York’s first African American governor, and also the first legally bind person to be the chief executive of any state.