As New York State struggles to hack away at a budget deficit that has realistically taken many years to build, the reductions to trim the bloated red ink will affect almost every phase of how the state has operated for decades. Despite intense lobbying by the big public service unions to keep the status quo, there’s just no way that taxpayers can continue to provide the necessary revenue to satisfy those that have largely been previously insulated from the layoffs, pay and subsidized benefits reductions that have hit the private sector. To coin a phrase, it appears the time has come when everyone will “pay the fiddler.”
Trying to weigh the similarities and differences between public and private sector lobbying often boils down to which group makes the most noise and can put the most pressure on elected officials.
It is somewhat ironic that the one of the large lobbying groups that can lay claim to historically paying its own way, but is the least vocal as it sees its normal services and related benefits (if you could call them that) being trimmed by the budget knife. That group being the state’s sportsmen and women, who, through their licenses, permits and special sales taxes have been the main financial supporters of the state’s conservation and environmental programs for many years.
Even considering they were required to increase what they paid the state for licenses and permits just two years ago – advised back then that the hikes were necessary to keep conservation programs solvent – they have since seen many of the related programs and personnel still being cut. While several hundred showed up in Albany a month ago to voice their grievances, that pales when compared to the large protesting public service crowds that have lobbied there.
I suspect that many people feel that sportsmen just pay for the conservation that affects hunting and fishing, and while that is part of it, everyone, whether they hunt or fish or not, benefits from the billions of dollars the group generates that helps pay for a wide array of conservation and environmental projects in the state. Certainly lobbying representing the CSEA, NYS NEA, and other large public service groups can voice their displeasure regarding proposed budget and personnel cuts, but the negative impacts caused by conservation and environmental cuts will be felt by them as well as everyone who enjoys the state’s outdoor resources.
There appears to be a notable imbalance between unions representing public workers and those representing private workers. According to 2010 national data, the union membership rate for public sector workers, 36.2 percent, was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers, 6.9 percent. Workers in education, training and library occupations had the highest unionization rate, 37.1 percent. How out of control is it. For example, the current president of SUNY Albany receives both a pension from the Teacher Retirement System AND a salary, the two totally more than $500,000 per year. More than 2,100 state employees collected salaries and pensions last year – with 35 of them receiving more than $200,000 in combined compensation,
Imagine, if you will, that the state’s sportsmen and women formed a union. In reality, they basically are a union, albeit an unofficial one. Instead of dues, they pay the state, via licenses and fees.
However, the State, being “their union” too often turns a deaf ear to their grievances and concerns, but still keeps their money. Imagine what would happen if the CSEA or NEA officials tried that?
The decades of adding unrealistic growth to the budgets that support public service may not have been caused by those involved in the actual day-to-day workings, but rather by state (and federal) governments without the common business sense or backbone to simply say no to union lobbying pressure that likewise couldn’t see or apparently care where it would inevitably lead. Now an overweight public service bureaucracy is being told to go on a diet.
While I don’t mean to belittle any public service group’s concerns or aspirations for the future, what I do wish to convey is the common sense need to understand that the “funding well” where public service budget money comes from has grown dangerously low during this time of private sector recession, and taxpayers, meaning all of us, are likewise close to being tapped out But to quote one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson: “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.”
We may have already seen that with the recent closing of Rogers and Stoneykill Education Centers, two very popular education facilities that we were previously led to believe the funding to budget both was secure in the dedicated NYS Conservation Fund, made up primarily from license and permit fees and sales taxes paid by that rather quiet and generally ignored lobbying group known as our state’s sportsmen and women. Many feel that their closings were decided on because overall opposition was too weak to lobby sufficiently to keep them open. Given what appears to be the inevitable cuts to the public sector, which is and will generate strong lobbying against doing so, government was probably doing a toe-dip in the shallowest lobbying waters first.
Sadly, we’ve complacently watched as our government kept growing and expanding its public sector, while sectors in the private one continued to shrink. Now as the pendulum, by economic necessity, is starting to swing back to even the field, we may blame government, but the fault lies with us for allowing it to happen. Just ask the sportsmen and women of the state. They know all too well.