Paterson rebuts union attacks on pay hikes
ALBANY — Gov. David A. Paterson is taking heat from public employee unions that say he should be ashamed of giving pay raises to his inner circle during a fiscal crisis.
Paterson, however, said Tuesday the $250,000 in salary increases spread among some staff members is part of a net cut in executive chamber pay because he eliminated some jobs and cut executive branch spending 10 percent.
In July, when Paterson called for painful cuts in state spending and a hiring freeze, the governor’s office had 175 employees and a payroll of almost $15.2 million, according to the state comptroller. This month, the office has 157 employees and a payroll of almost $13.3 million.
Still, the public employee unions, which are spending millions on advertising campaigns to fight Paterson’s proposed budget, said the raises send the wrong signal as the governor asks union workers to give up their 3 percent raises for a year to avoid layoffs.
“The governor and his top staff ought to be ashamed of themselves,” said Steve Madaraz, spokesman for the Civil Service Employees Association. “It’s not about the substance. You can justify anything. It has to do with the symbolism.”
Among the staffers who got raises is William Cunningham, Paterson’s top aide. As secretary to the governor, he was hired to fill the vacancy in November at a salary of $178,500, the same pay for the position in 2007 but a 5 percent raise from his previous pay as a temporary senior adviser.
Paterson defended the raises, saying he streamlined the executive chamber as part of his order to cut 10 percent from state agencies before he pushed the Legislature to cut programs.
He later asked unions to reopen negotiations on contracts that included raises of about 3 percent annually, before the recession and Wall Street’s meltdown cut state revenues and compounded what he said were years of overspending.
“When people move up, they usually get a raise, but you are not really raising the amount of money you are spending on the whole group,” Paterson said in an interview. If reporters “found out we were doing that, then there would be a story.”
Madaraz said the union refuses to reopen its contracts during the fiscal crisis, which includes a projected $14 billion deficit for the 2009-10 fiscal year beginning April 1.
Instead, the union offered about a dozen alternatives to help ease the fiscal crisis, including increasing income taxes for the wealthiest New Yorkers and ending the use of private sector professionals to do work that could be done by state workers.
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