Tax cap, Indian cigarettes, family leave are matters for Legislature's final days
Negotiating table laden with bills
ALBANY — Requiring drug companies to disclose gifts to doctors, strengthening teen driving laws, banning manufacturers from selling tax-free cigarettes to Indian retailers and capping property taxes are all on the negotiating table in the waning days of the State Legislature’s 2008 session.
Lawmakers are also considering undoing a law that blocks non-union companies from bidding on many public works construction projects, altering how industrial development agencies are run and greatly expanding leave benefits for people who take up to three months off to care for a baby or a seriously ill family member.
Which of those actually happen will be known by Monday, when the Senate is vowing to stick to its schedule to head home and begin campaigning for re-election this fall.
Also being discussed is an overhaul of a law that has not worked in most upstate communities to help redevelop aging industrial sites known as brownfields, as well as a ban on mandatory overtime for nurses and a move to weaken the power of the control board overseeing Buffalo’s finances. Legislation also moved to open up more drilling for oil and natural gas in New York.
Gov. David A. Paterson, meanwhile, kept pressure on the Legislature to back his property tax cap plan, this time with people wearing T-shirts with “74” emblazoned on their fronts, representing the percentage of New Yorkers in a new poll who say they back a tax cap.
“We feel that it is driving people out of this state,” Paterson said of rising property taxes, which help give New York the nation’s highest state and local tax burden. He urged voters to join his cause.
By afternoon, though, it again was clear the Legislature isn’t biting. Assembly Democrats said they won’t go for a tax cap unless there is some guarantee that schools won’t be left shortchanged, though Assembly leaders have not explained what precisely that means. In the Senate, Republicans say they back a plan to eliminate all property taxes by having the state pay for all school expenses — though they won’t say how it will be funded.
Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, who joined Paterson Tuesday, criticized lawmakers, saying the Legislature has to decide whether to support the governor or "are they just going to ignore that and play the typical Albany game" of passing meaningless, one-house bills on the topic "and do nothing and go home."
Later in the day, the governor spent a half-hour behind closed doors meeting with labor leaders at an Albany hotel. Emerging from the session, he said the AFL-CIO executives want a measure to provide temporary disability benefits to workers taking family leave, a hike in unemployment insurance benefits and ensuring that wage standards are part of any extension to the state's industrial development agency program.
Business groups are fighting all of those ideas, saying they will be too costly and come at a time when the state's economy is sluggish at best.
Paterson said he is seeking a more comprehensive approach to changing the IDA program, which has been criticized for not creating promised jobs and funneling expensive tax breaks to well-off companies. But he said he is "not as optimistic" a package can be put together in the next week.
He said the union push for a prevailing wage provision in an IDA bill is a problem for some.
"The upstate counties are very, very opposed to it because of their limited resources," he said. "We had a plan to spread it around, let the counties make their own decisions, but the unions don't seem to be in favor of that."
The governor said there are active talks to amend a deal from this spring affecting the state's Wicks Law, which involves public construction projects. Upstate, non-union companies say they will be blocked from bidding because of the way the law was structured.
"I think at a certain point we're going to have to tweak the Wicks law," he said, without elaborating. The new provision kicks in at the end of the month.
On the teen driving front, legislation is advancing to create a panel … co-chaired by the heads of the state education department and motor vehicles office … to come up with ways to improve driver's education programs, which have languished in many school districts over the years and that parents say are too costly and offered at inconvenient times.
Measures are also advancing to reduce the number of non-family members allowed in the car of a teen driver and to require more training behind-the-wheel for new drivers before they can get their license.
Health groups, meanwhile, are pressing for passage of a measure making it illegal for tobacco manufacturers to sell tax-free cigarettes to Indian retailers, while two Buffalo area lawmakers … Sen. Dale Volker and Assemblyman Dennis Gabryszak … have a measure to bring a new high-technology encryption system to cigarette packs intended to cut down on bootlegging.
Lawmakers did give final passage Tuesday to a measure banning smoking in college dormitories. SUNY dorms last year became smoke free; the bill would apply to private colleges, too.
