Politics on the Hudson

   Judith Kaye, New York’s first woman and longest serving chief judge, will deliver her final annual State of the Judiciary report tomorrow in Albany. Kaye is stepping down Dec. 31 because she is “aging out” of the judicial system, which has a mandatory retirement age of 70.

 As leader of the state’s highest court for 15 years, Kaye has ruled on cases that put an end to the death penalty in New York and required the state to pour billions more dollars into the New York City school system. She has been unsuccessful, however, in securing pay increases for the judiciary. Lawmakers, who traditionally align their pay hikes with those of judges, have not taken up the cause. Judges’ pay has not increased since 1999. Judges have filed a lawsuit to force the Legislature into approving raises. The suit is pending.

   Kaye, a native of Sullivan County, speaks at 1 p.m. She will be at New York University to deliver her address, which will be webcast.

   A commission has been charged with vetting potential successors and recommending seven names to Gov. David Paterson by Dec. 1. The governor will announce his pick by mid-January.

(National Archives photo.)

The New York Commission on Property Tax Relief’s public-hearing tour around the state is coming to an end. On Wednesday, the panel holds its 14th and final public hearing on how the state can help property taxpayers. The meeting begins at 1 p.m. at the Onondaga County Court House in Syracuse, and it will be webcast.

The commission is focusing on special education, school-district mandate relief, the impact of property taxes on the Big 4 large-city school districts (Yonkers, Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo), boards of cooperative educational services and school-district consolidating issues.

The panel’s final report has to be submitted in three weeks. In a preliminary report released in June, the commission recommended a cap on the growth of school property taxes. Once that is in place, the state should implement a circuit-breaker mechanism, meaning property taxes would be limited if they reached a certain proportion of a homeowner’s income, the report said. The commission made more than 20 recommendations to reduce mandates on school districts and address the root causes of high property taxes.

   The mid-year update to the state budget makes some changes in estimated costs for 2009-10. In most cases, programs will be more expensive to operate, according to the financial plan. Examples include:

  —Higher projected school-aid costs of $13 million. The increase is primarily being driven by growth in building aid and excess cost aid for special education.

  —Less state Lottery money available for education. New games offered this year have not performed as well as expected.

  —The state’s share of child welfare services is expected to grow by $31 million because of projected growth in local child-welfare claims. The state pays 63.7 percent of certain services.

  —The cost-of-living allowance increase for human-services workers will cost $35 million more than expected because the 12-month consumer-price increase the raises are based on is 5.6 percent, not 3.5 percent as originally estimated.

  —Projected health-insurance costs for state employees and retirees have been reduced by about $100 million.

  —State University of New York and City University of New York community colleges will cost $28 million more than expected in 2009-10 because of growth in enrollment projections.

  —New laws passed this year are expected to add $1.7 million this year and $3.2 million in the future, including legislation that requires crisis-intervention and community services for sexually exploited youth; the creation of a statewide cancer-incidence map; and setting up guidelines to prevent “over-concentration” of sex offenders in communities.

   One of the big tasks for an ex-assemblyman just hired by the state School Boards Association for government relations work will be to keep the Big 4 city school districts—Yonkers, Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse—under the control of school boards. The board hired Steven Sanders, a New York City Democrat who chaired the Assembly’s Education Committee before leaving office a few years ago.

   “There’s been a discussion for years, kind of a buzz, that potentially the mayors of the largest cities upstate could potentially go the way of New York City in terms of mayoral control,” said David Albert, a spokesman for the School Boards Association, which is holding its annual convention in New York City this weekend.

     Sanders helped craft a 2002 law authorizing mayoral control of New York City public schools, the nation’s largest school system. The law is up for renewal in 2009, and Sanders’ job is to make sure that any changes “include a stronger policy-making role for the school board and greater opportunities for community representation,” according to the School Boards Association.

   The original law “was not intended to give the mayor absolute and unquestioned power over all education policy,” said Timothy Kremer, executive director of the association. (more…)

 At a meeting scheduled for Sept. 29, the State University of New York’s Finance and Administration Committee expects to receive reports on how its campuses will implement $40 million in reductions, according to H. Carl McCall, chairman of the committee.   With the latest round of state budget cuts last month, SUNY will be losing $96.3 million in funding. Most of the loss will be absorbed by the SUNY system, but it will be up to campuses to make the rest of the reductions, McCall has said.

   In earlier budget reductions, SUNY lost about $50 million in state operating funds. The impact on campuses so far has included fewer courses, larger class sizes and unfilled faculty positions.

   Gov. David Paterson has ordered spending cuts because of an ongoing economic slowdown and projected state budget shortfalls. In light of the problems on Wall Street this week, the governor could call the Legislature back to do more cutting.

   Forty-seven districts will begin the new school year at impasse with teacher unions, 13 percent lower than last year, according to the state Public Employment Relations Board. About 175 other districts will begin the year without labor contracts, but they are not at impasses and have not yet sought any assistance from PERB.

   As many as 132 impasses have existed at the start of the school year since the advent of the Taylor Law. (The law made striking illegal but gave public employees the right to unionize and bargain collectively, and it set up a mediation and arbitration process.)

   For this year, there are tentative agreements in a small number of the 47 districts but ratification votes have not yet taken place, PERB said in a report this week. Twenty-seven of the impasses involve contracts that expired before the 2007-08 school year. 

   There are 12 impasses in Western New York, six in Central New York, seven in Northern New York and the Capital Region and 22 downstate and on Long Island. For the Lower Hudson Valley, that includes Garrison, Hendrick Hudson, Rye, Rye Neck and Southern Westchester Board of Cooperative Educational Services.

   “Teacher contract impasses have declined primarily because school districts and employee organizations were prescient enough to enter into multi-year agreements during a period of relatively stable prices, financial markets and budgets,” Richard Curreri of PERB said in a statement. “While it remains to be seen whether this is the calm before the storm, as these long-term contracts expire, and new negotiations take place in the more difficult economic environment we’re now facing, it is fair to expect that the number of disputes will be on the rise.”

   School board members from around New York who were polled by the state School Boards Association said their top concerns for the year included adequate state school aid (37 percent), the rising cost of employee benefits (23 percent) and the high cost of fuel (9 percent).

   “While student achievement and improving graduation rates are always on the minds of school board members, this poll tells us that they are very concerned about having the proper resources to meet the rising tide of employee benefits and energy costs,” Timothy Kremer, executive director of the group, said in a statement.

   The economic downturn may affect schools and students in the form of longer bus rides, fewer extracurricular activities and more expensive lunches, according to the association.

    “The increased costs we all deal with in our day-to-day lives are having the same impact on school districts,” Kremer said. 

   Many of those polled said joining a health-care or other kind of purchasing consortium or consolidating school-district business functions could help control costs this year.

   Results are based on more than 450 responses online from school board members.

 State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli just announced that his office revoked the state and local retirement system of three attorneys (Joseph Pondolfino, Thomas DeBoy and Gilbert Henoch) and rescinded retirement service credit for three others (Michael Bergan, Paul Dierdorf and Eugene Renzi).   “State pensions are strictly for employees of state and local governments,” DiNapoli said in a statement. “Independent contractors do not qualify for state pensions. We are continuing to look at lawyers in the Retirement System to ensure no one is receiving a pension they don’t deserve.”
 
   The Oneonta Central School District in Otsego County incorrectly reported Pondolfino as an employee to the Retirement System, but he was independent contractor, according to DiNapoli. That allowed him to receive nearly 11 years of service credit and an annual pension of $1,999 since 2004. The district did not control or supervise Pondolfino’s work and Pondolfino did not work set hours.  

   DeBoy incorrectly received 3.75 years of service credit from Cheektowaga Central School District in Erie County since 2004 because the district incorrectly reported DeBoy as an employee when he acted as an independent contractor. DeBoy performed services for the district as an independent contractor from 2000 until 2004, when the district added him to the payroll. DeBoy did not work set hours and did not maintain an office at the district. (more…)

   In a briefing paper released today, the American Federation of Teachers says tax caps implemented around the country (and being considered in New York) had had a “devastating impact” on school special-education services. They inflate costs and reduce access for children in need, New York State United Teachers said in a news release about the report. School districts with growing numbers of special-education students, and increasing costs to educate them, struggle as a result.

   Larger class sizes, lower test scores and a decline in education quality are other byproducts of tax caps, according to the AFT.

   “At a time when students with disabilities in New York are succeeding and meeting the same rigorous Regents requirements as their non-disabled peers, it would be nothing short of immoral to derail their progress by passing an election-year gimmick that would only harm our public-education system and fail to bring any meaningful tax relief to New Yorkers,” NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi said in a statement.  

   Gov. David Paterson has proposed putting an annual limit on the increase in education spending, and the GOP-controlled Senate recently adopted legislation to do that. The Democrat-led Assembly has not. NYSUT wants the Legislature to pass a “circuit breaker” tax, which would limit property taxes based on homeowners’ ability to pay. Lawmakers will return for a special session tomorrow to deal with the state’s fiscal crisis.

   State aid doesn’t make up for lost revenues in a comprehensive fashion, the AFT report said. Property taxes are used to partly fill gaps created by state cutbacks in hard economic times. Schools in districts where there are tax limitations have poorer student achievement, it said.

   NYSUT, the state’s largest union, has about 600,000 members and is affiliated with AFT, the National Education Association and the AFL-CIO.

The state’s teacher’s union suspended its endorsements for all state Senators — Democrats and Republicans — who supported Gov. David Paterson’s tax cap bill.

The leadership of New York State United Teachers said in a statement they were reviewing the position of every member of the Assembly because they believe a cap “would harm children and public education.”

“Those who choose political expediency over the future of New York’s children and public schools — and favor a gimmick that offers only the illusion of tax relief over a real reduction in property taxes for over-burdened homeowners — will not earn our endorsement,” said NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi in a statement. “They made a choice and we are making ours.”

The union is supporting candidates who reject the cap concept and support taxing wealthier people, such as what they’ve called a “millionaire’s tax.”

NYSUT endorsed the following local candidates:U.S. House of Representatives — Nita Lowey, D-Harrison, Eliot Engel, D-Bronx, John Hall, D- Dover Plains.New York State Senate — Andrea Stewart Cousins, D-Yonkers, Suzi Oppenheimer, D-Mamaroneck, and Ruth Hassell-Thompson, D-Mt. Vernon.New York State Assembly — James Pretlow, D-Mt. Vernon, Amy Paulin, D-Scarsdale, Adam Bradley, D-White Plains, Richard Brodsky, D-Greenburgh, George Latimer, D-Rye, Mike Spano, D-Yonkers, Kenneth Zebrowski, D-New City, and Ellen Jaffee, D-Suffern.