Freeze is on for State Senate, but not here
Democrats’ office in Buffalo excluded
Even though the State Senate has ordered a freeze on hiring and salary increases as a result of the state budget crisis, it does not apply to the new majority office slated for downtown Buffalo.
Sources familiar with a memo issued this week by Secretary of the Senate Angelo J. Aponte say the freeze is effective immediately without regard to previous budget allocations. The memo instructs Democratic senators to refrain from hiring under any circumstances without special permission.
But because arrangements are already under way for the new positions in Buffalo, they are unaffected by the freeze, Senate spokesman Austin Shafran said Friday.
“The hiring freeze won’t affect any positions laid out in the central hiring plan,” he said, adding he did not anticipate that special permission would be needed for the Buffalo hires.
Though other Senate officials indicated earlier that eight to 10 new staffers would be hired at the expanded Buffalo office (along with regional operations in Rochester, Syracuse, and Long Island and existing offices in Albany and New York), Shafran said plans now call for six employees here.
Former heavyweight boxer Joe Mesi, who lost his Senate bid last fall to Republican Michael H. Ranzenhofer, already has been hired at $70,000 annually to act as regional director of the new Senate majority office. Five other people will be hired in the coming weeks to work with him.
Senate Democrats have absorbed a barrage of criticism in the past few weeks for the hiring, which some call “patronage.” But officials explained the office would not require any new spending, while pointing to a similar two-employee operation maintained by the former Republican majority as precedent.
They also defend the new operation as an innovation that will bring the Senate majority and its policies in more direct contact with New Yorkers.
“It will serve as a liaison for the majority leader with the local community, working with local community groups,” Shafran said on April 13. “It’s another mechanism of community outreach to make sure we’re meeting the needs of the broader community.”
Republican critics also chimed in last week when former Amherst Supervisor Susan J. Grelick was hired at $90,000 a year to serve as counsel to the Senate Local Government Committee.
Ranzenhofer called the Grelick hiring “wasteful and ill-timed.”
“What I’m opposed to is the creation of patronage jobs at the $70,000 and $90,000 levels when people in Western New York are struggling to find jobs for $30,000 and $40,000 and when young people are being driven out from our communities,” Ranzenhofer said. “In this environment, you can’t spend taxpayers’ dollars on these high-paying, patronage jobs.”
Senate Democrats also came under recent fire for raising the pay of new majority staffers anywhere from 20 to 55 percent in the offices of local Sens. Antoine M. Thompson of Buffalo and William T. Stachowski of Lake View, citing a bigger share of Senate duties after assuming the majority.
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