EDITORIALS
Cut state spending
Gov. Paterson rightly sees the need, but must find ways to control budget
Updated: 04/29/08 6:37 AM
Gov. David A. Paterson, out of the shadow of his suddenly departed predecessor and with the budget for the year done, moved this month to make a significant and necessary change in the whole thinking of state government. He shocked everyone last week by ordering a semi-freeze in state hiring and threatening to withhold money from state agencies that don’t meet spending limits he expects to enforce.
The next day, Paterson announced that he had formed a committee of top staffers, including Budget Director Laura Anglin, to look throughout all of the state’s operations for ways and means to spend less and focus what is spent on necessary functions.
In itself, no hiring freeze will rescue the state from its fiscal woes. The state’s $15 billion payroll is but 19 percent of its $80.5 billion general operating fund. Add their offices, cars, computers and paper clips, and all state agencies consume only 30 percent of the operating budget. The other 70 percent is money sent to cities, counties, school districts and to the health care providers who see to the poor.
But one does what one can. What Paterson could do was to point to the part of the enacted budget that expects state agencies to trim their spending by 3.35 percent. The first step in hitting that target is a semi-permeable ban on new hiring, the governor told the agencies under his control.
“Only job openings absolutely essential to your agency’s operations and protecting the health and safety of New Yorkers are to be filled,” Paterson’s memo stated. “Positions that do not fit this criterion must be left vacant.”
Of course, one bureaucrat’s non-essential personnel is another bureaucrat’s “absolutely essential.” So the governor will have to do more than order a freeze.
He’ll have to enforce it.
But Paterson has thought of that. He’s made it clear that, as each agency submits its plans for meeting budget reduction goals, he will evaluate them and determine whether something more forceful is necessary. He might lay on a hard hiring freeze, or forget to send some agency directors some of their budget.
Paterson is not doing this just to establish himself as the new sheriff in town. As he has often expressed since being catapulted into the governor’s chair, the state is in fiscal trouble.
Revenues are down. But tax increases are not a viable option because, in New York, taxes are already too high. Paterson notes with shame that people are leaving, not just rust belt upstate, but many parts of New York, not always because they can’t get jobs, but often because they can create their own jobs and are choosing to do so in New Jersey or Georgia. All eight Western New York counties lost population last year, as did four of the state’s largest five counties, and the entire state grew by just 15,741 residents — well below the national average.
Paterson pledges to reverse what even he, a longtime creature of Albany, calls the state’s “spending binge” by offering the leadership necessary to rein in the state’s plethora of special spending authorities, get a handle on questionable tax breaks that supposedly encourage new businesses and reconsider whether the state’s property tax rebate program really does anything to hold property taxes down.
An exceedingly tall order, that. The $121.7 billion state budget approved during Albany’s change-of-command crisis increases spending by 4.4 percent over last year, well above the rate of inflation, at a time when a recession threatens to engulf Wall Street — where market activity accounts for 20 percent of the state’s tax revenues. But at least the task has gotten some much-needed attention, with Paterson’s first step toward budget sanity.
