I know that he has other things on his mind. But David Paterson needs to take a break in his fight for political survival to save downtown Buffalo.

Add the faded Lafayette Hotel, which will be empty by month’s end, to the list of grand downtown buildings on the endangered list.

The problem is a new state law that was touted as a tool to save grand, historic buildings. As it turns out, the law is all but toothless. The governor needs to implant some fangs.

There was plenty of backslapping among politicians last summer when Paterson came to Buffalo to sign the law. Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, praised for pushing it through, oversold it as “one of the most significant job-creating and economic-development bills we’ve seen . . . in a generation.” If only.

The law was supposed to hand developers the tax-credit help they needed to revive big, historic buildings. Instead, in typical Albany fashion, it turns out we were handed a near-empty bag. The law touted by Hoyt as a cure-all is, we are painfully finding out, missing key pieces that are the difference between a bang and a whimper.

“It’s not even half a loaf,” developer Rocco Termini told me last week. “It’s nothing . . . This law is useless.”

Termini sounded disgusted, and with good reason. Without the full-service tax credits, Termini’s plans to revive the Lafayette Hotel and the nearby, long-vacant AM&A’s eyesore—as well any hopes of restoring the Statler and other derelict downtown buildings—are a fantasy.

When I called Hoyt this week in Albany, he admitted that the law he co-sponsored is “not what it was touted as being. I don’t dispute that, and it was all of us touting it . . . Without the extra pieces, it is not as beneficial as we would like.”

In other words, the hype outweighed the reality.

I do not want to bang away at Hoyt, who—unlike many of his colleagues— at least has reviving downtown on his radar screen. But a lot of people’s hopes were raised by this. Hoyt got plenty of high-fives—including a preservation award—for pushing through a law that he knew would not deliver as promised. He admitted that, under threat of a Paterson veto, he and other legislators passed a watered-down bill. “My strategy in terms of agreeing to it was that it was better than nothing at all,” Hoyt said.

Fair enough. The problem, aside from Hoyt pretending that the law was something it wasn’t, is we are left holding a near-empty bag.

Paterson and his bean-counters are to blame for neutering the law over concerns about its costs. That view ignores the bigger picture: Albany’s short-term outlay in tax credits pays off in the long run as people are put to work; as grand downtown buildings are revived and spur other development; as new property tax dollars flow.

Hoyt slammed Paterson’s budget director, Robert Megna, for persuading Paterson last summer to de-fang the tax credit bill. Hoyt said he is trying to persuade Paterson to now sign a full-package tax-credit law, one that does what last year’s law was supposed to: Make it financially doable for developers to revive historic buildings.

“If we get the go-ahead from the governor,” Hoyt said, “we can pass the bill tomorrow.”

And if a frog had wings, it would not bump its butt. Look, I want this to happen as much as anybody. But I doubt that a politically wounded governor will agree to something that, in the short run, adds an expense when he is facing an $8 billion budget hole. The time, in my view, to get this done right was last summer, and—as we are painfully learning —that did not happen.

Add the Lafayette Hotel to the endangered-building list. Until politicians deliver on promises, the hits will keep coming.