ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) – The state budget is expected to be late again.
With the Legislature planning to take its Passover-Easter break through the state budget deadline on Thursday, Gov. David Paterson on Sunday took lawmakers to task and added a last-ditch effort to cap the growth of some of the nation’s highest property taxes.
Legislative leaders were scheduled to meet privately with lawmakers through Sunday evening on one of the toughest budgets Albany has ever seen. It includes some of the deepest cuts ever in school aid and other areas to contend with a fiscal crisis. But with the last public proposals more than $1 billion apart, the only firm plan for Monday was for the Senate to give final legislative approval of Paterson’s emergency bare-bones spending plan Monday, then leave Albany.
Paterson, a Democrat, said meetings on Saturday and Sunday announced by legislative leaders were “to make the public feel as if there’s more work being done than there really is.” Republican Sen. Thomas Libous, of Broome County, had said a late Friday budget meeting of legislative leaders to announce the weekend sessions was “a bluff.” Many lawmakers had already left Albany for the weekend and the start of their vacations.
Austin Shafran, spokesman for Senate Conference Leader John Sampson, a Brooklyn Democrat, said right now there aren’t any anticipated session days.
“That does not mean in any way that working on the budget will cease,” Shafran said Sunday. “Our members are going to continue work during that time period.”
Lawmakers had scheduled the annual break for Monday until April 7.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said Sunday his Democrats will be on call during the holidays if “sufficient progress” is made. He said the Assembly budget staff will work through the holidays.
“The biggest problem area is how you manage this deficit,” he said. “It’s progressing very slowly.”
On Sunday, Paterson struck religious themes in radio interviews. He urged lawmakers to honor the Jewish and Christian traditions of self-sacrifice by making unpopular spending cuts that will benefit New Yorkers and future generations.
“We have got to make some tough choices,” Paterson told WABC in New York. “We are not living up to the great sacrifices that our predecessors made so that we would be living in a better place.”
Paterson said the Legislature so far agrees on only about $3.3 billion in cuts compared to his $4.8 billion. The Assembly and Senate don’t agree on Paterson’s tax increases on cigarettes and sugary soda, so the governor says lawmakers aren’t a third of the way to addressing the $9.2 billion deficit in the 2010-11 fiscal year.
“They are talking about borrowing. We should be cutting,” he told WBEN in Buffalo, noting more than $6 billion a year already has to be spent to pay down borrowing dating to the 1990s. “You collapse from the interest payments on what you borrowed more than the borrowing itself ... we have to learn you can’t solve fiscal problems by building up debt.”
He refers to the Assembly’s plan to borrow $2 billion, a figured provided by Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch.
Last week, more than a week beyond the due dates, the Legislature presented responses to Paterson’s budget proposal. The Democrat-led Assembly presented a $136.8 billion plan; the Democrat-led Senate presented a $136.1 billion version. Both are responses to Paterson’s January proposal of $134 billion for the 2010-11 budget due Thursday. The current budget is about $131 billion.
The three versions point to a budget that will cut aid to public schools and public universities while keeping parks and historic sites open and closing some prisons. There are no proposed broad-based tax increases, although the Assembly’s Democratic majority wants to add another dollar to the tax on a pack of cigarettes.
The Senate supports capping local government and school property taxes by about 4 percent a year; the Assembly doesn’t.
The state budget was late by a few days in each of the last three years, after breaking a streak of 21 straight years of late budgets.