Reforming Albany: Now, the rest of the story

My last column, “Stop playing games with the budget deficit” (Feb. 3) was written one week before New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli issued his analysis of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive budget draft.

The irrationality I outlined fell short of anticipating the following mea-culpa expressed in the comptroller’s analysis. “The SFY 2010-2011 enacted budget relied on $16.7 billion in non-recurring or temporary budget resources; and overly optimistic tax revenue projections, causing a dramatically worsened state structural deficit.” How dramatic? These tenuous entries constituted 30 percent of all the monies in the state’s operating fund.

DiNapoli’s analysis also noted “the proposed budget includes over $4.0 billion in saving targets, without details identifying where and how the savings will be achieved, making these targets a risk to the financial plan in both SFY 2011-12 and beyond.”

With a half measure of repentance, the new budget is “less reliant on temporary and non-recurring actions relying on ‘only’ $7.7 billion, a 54 per cent reduction.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Gov. Cuomo plans to transform the budget process, eliminating a $10 billion deficit without borrowing or tax increases. The details involved are shown in the comptroller’s analysis with 57 cents out of every dollar saved coming from (equally shared) reductions in Medicaid and school aid funding.

I would love to have been in the back room when this decision was reached. Medicaid spending is over $53 billion and has been ravaged by years of well-documented fraud, wasteful spending and inefficiencies beyond anyone’s imagination. It’s time to get serious and evaluate where our tax dollars are best spent. Every dollar saved could be a dollar gained to support valued education funding.

The rest of the gap-closing exercise is what you might have expected. More than 9,748 layoffs are envisioned if concessions are not forthcoming. How likely? Ninety-four percent of the state’s work force is represented by unions (and earn an average $98,854 annually). These workers are hardly willing to give back the 14 percent in salary increases they have gained since 2007. Also, very minor adjustments appear in this gap-closing exercise concerning the funding of public authorities and possible gains that might be made through consolidation, etc.

The analysis cited in this column is available on www.osc.state.ny.us. Its use by local officials and school administrators is highly recommended.

This is the 11th installment in a series of columns on the topic of reforming New York’s dysfunctional state government. You can read these columns at www.liherald.com/opinions/op-ed. Peterson is a resident of Rockville Centre. He retired as Director-Internal Audit NYNEX Corporate, and serves as a business advisor to a number of information technology companies.