Now comes the spring
of our discontent

Every year sometime about now, while I’m looking at juggling my usual quota of deadlines and staring at the dusty pile of records that will have to be transformed into my income tax filing in a month’s time, my mind wanders off to the north, to a place where there are no deadlines, or least none for those who make them for others.

Of course I speak of the Legislature in Albany, where, as satirized in the play “1776,” “they all speak very loud and very fast and nothing ever gets done.”

I’m reminded of this situation again this year, not because the budget is already late, but because everyone in February already knows that it will be late. The Republican minority in the Assembly is already holding hearings designed to beat up the Democratic majority about their tardiness. They have come up with a “one time, every time” reform plan that would, amongst other things, end Albany’s “three men in a room” (the Governor, the Senate majority leader and the Assembly speaker) tradition of budget making. Oddly enough, only the Republicans in Assembly are outraged by the tradition. I wonder if their outrage would be soothed by the election of a Republican majority in the Assembly, so there might be “three Republicans in a room,” instead of only two.

Then too, I’m reminded of my own outrage when I hear the Eldred Central School business manager tells me of the rank unfairness of the state’s proposed changes to school building aid in the new budget. With a budget shortfall looming, the plan essentially re-amortizes the state’s obligations on existing projects. Compare it to paying your $120 phone bill in $10 monthly installments over the next year. What’s that, you say the line went dead?

The only good part about the new aid plan for Eldred, she said, would be that the district’s existing 38 percent aid rate is so low that it wouldn’t be hurt nearly as badly as districts that fund 70 and 80 percent of their buildings with aid dollars. In other words, Eldred gets stabbed with a shorter knife.

Then there are our legislators’ late winter money distribution junkets in the district. Did you ever wonder why, when the budget is done, at worst, in August, that the announcement of funding for this, that, or the other pork barrel project has to wait until February or March.

Certainly, the money is going for good projects and we do appreciate Senator Bonacic’s recent $75,000 worth of announcements and Assemblyman Gunther’s timely $54,000 in funding. But what about the timing? Are they really that slow typing up the checks, or are they greasing us up for the new spring shaft yet to come?

So we have the Assembly Republican’s plan, the Eldred business manager’s complaint and the legislators’ pork barrel distribution calendar. These are only three recent examples and if you have anything at all to do with state government, no doubt you can add one or more favorites of your own list. Viewed together, what does it mean?

It means state government in New York doesn’t work very well, and it hasn’t for a long time, and that government is so comfortable with itself that it really doesn’t give a damn whether it works or not.

In past rantings along these lines, we made various recommendations including voting out all the incumbents and pressing an Article 78 (show cause why you are not doing your job) action against the Legislature. A particular favorite was a plan to withhold individual state income tax payments (due April 15, two weeks after the budget is supposed to be done) until the Legislature completes the budget.

We never really managed to raise any rabble, even in times when people were wondering whether the last one out of Sullivan County was going to turn off the lights. Now, we’re looking at a boom. Who will care?

The answer is, good times or bad, we all should care what kind of government represents us. Our consciences are engaged on issues like abortion and the death penalty, but we are no less responsible for the day-to-day conduct of routine public administration.

Whether it be via litigation or a constitutional convention, New York State government needs an overhaul.

David Hulse, News Editor