Legislative Updates
| The Riddell Group, LLC 119 Washington Ave., 2nd Flr. Albany, N.Y. 12210 Phone: (518) 434-7400/Fax: 434-0558 |
Memo
| To: | All Clients |
| From: | Glenn T. Riddell |
| Date: | June 30, 2011 |
| Re: | Client Update |
Governor Cuomo's first six months:
Governor Andrew Cuomo, who promised a "new New York" as a candidate for governor, showed he remains committed to systemic change by pushing landmark legislation through his first legislative session as the state's chief executive.
The Governor has many good reasons to be proud of the first legislative session of his administration. The public gave him an electoral mandate and, remarkably, Governor Cuomo emerges from his inaugural season even stronger than when he started. He made big and specific promises on the campaign trail and, conquering Albany's deep dysfunction, he stole a march on fulfilling them.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos followed the governor's lead as well. Cuomo showed the high quality of leadership that New Yorkers have long wanted.
The governor's biggest victory was the property tax cap - a landmark in the battle against out-of-control government spending in New York. Spiraling levies on Long Island and upstate - 78% higher than the national average - have been a dead weight on the economy. Now, the cap will limit the annual growth of property taxes to 2% or the inflation rate, whichever is less, unless 60% of voters approve otherwise. Local governments, meet fiscal discipline.
Assembly Democrats coupled this crucial reform with a continuation and tightening of rent regulation. But Cuomo negotiated modest changes that will allow the city's slow-motion transition to a healthier free market in housing to go forward.
Also to the great good, Cuomo ushered through a state budget that cut overall spending for the first time in 16 years. As he promised on the campaign trail, he balanced a $10 billion deficit without raising taxes and with a bare minimum of borrowing which goes a long way toward structural balance in coming years.
Included in Cuomo's spending plan was a commitment to limit the out-of-control growth of Medicaid, a longtime bank-breaker that just might be coming under control.
Cuomo also pushed through an ethics overhaul that will force lawmakers to come - partially - clean about outside income and subject themselves - partially - to independent oversight.
Finally, he won major concessions from the biggest state workers' union that, if replicated across the workforce, could save hundreds of millions. To be sure, the Governor has lots more work to do. For example, Cuomo's plan for trimming excessively generous pensions for newly hired state and city workers awaits action.
Session may be over, but work still remains:
Lawmakers at the end of the session displayed a rare degree of bipartisanship, especially in the narrowly divided Senate, where in the span of several hours Democrats and Republican came to together to pass a tax cap and a nationally heralded same-sex marriage law.
But cross-party cooperation has its limits, with Exhibit A being the abrupt dropping on Friday of legislation to create a Health Benefit Exchange, as called for in President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.
While the measure passed earlier in the Democratic-dominated Assembly, Republicans control a 32-30-seat majority in the Senate, which went home without taking up the health exchange.
Supporters of the law say millions of dollars in federal funding may be at risk. But Republicans say there is still time -- and they are loath to support the Obama plan, which their fellow Republicans continue to fight in Congress.
The Senate's health care halt represents a relatively rare instance in which national Republican-Democratic policy debates seeped down directly to the state level.
"Many of our members felt that this would be buying into Obamacare, and there is some objection to it," Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos said Monday.
"We felt it was not appropriate to bring it up for a vote at this time, and actually a number of other states have not bought into it at this time," Skelos said during an interview with radio host John Gambling on WOR.
Democrats and health care advocates criticized the failure to act, saying it could cost money.
Obama's Affordable Care Act requires states to set up health exchanges, or markets for individuals and small businesses to buy health insurance. The exchanges are supposed to be operating by 2014, and if the states don't do it the federal government will do it for them, Sciandra explained.
Before that, states are supposed to get federal certification by the start of 2013 that their exchanges are ready to operate.
Ultimately, New York could miss out on some $100 million in federal funds to start the exchange, since that money will only go to states with a law in place, according to the Cancer Society.
Skelos noted that dealing with an exchange may have simply overloaded the Senate in its frenzied push to finish up on Friday
.Additionally, lawmakers typically return after the end of a session for "clean up bills" or largely technical laws that need to pass for continued state operation and perhaps to consider items like gubernatorial nominations to various boards and commissions.
"My guess is in the next few weeks we'll go back," said Skelos.
Lawmakers and Cuomo have other issues to deal with this summer as well.
On Friday, the state Department of Environmental Conservation is scheduled to issue at least part of a "Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement," on plans for hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, for natural gas in the Marcellus shale region.
The agency issued its initial report, which could ultimately lay out ground rules and restrictions on hydrofracking in September 2009, but then-Gov. David Paterson sent it back for revision amid concerns about its thoroughness. "We will be complying with the terms of that order," said DEC spokeswoman Emily DeSantis.
Also, Cuomo expects in the next 10 days or so to announce where he plans to close thousands of prison beds as part of a downsizing plan.
"We were a little busy the last few weeks," Cuomo said
Senate Republicans, many of whom have prisons in their upstate districts, have basically agreed to let the governor choose the closures. Cuomo has promised money to help upstate prison towns try to retool their economies, which will likely be hit by job losses if prisons close or shrink.
Additionally, observers note that letting the governor announce the closures takes the pressure off individual senators, who are expected to fight for continued state jobs in their communities
451 pink slips target PEF job:
For the second time in seven months, layoff notices are being issued to state workers. Four hundred and fifty-one state workers who are in the first wave of what could be thousands of job cuts are scheduled to receive their 20-day layoff notices Thursday.
While some workers with more seniority will be able to "retreat" to lower-paying jobs, they will in turn displace less-senior workers. The net result will be at least 451 state employees leaving the payroll by the end of July.
The planned job cuts are coming across a wide spectrum of state agencies and will impact members of several unions, although the vast majority will hit the Public Employees Federation, one of the state's largest bargaining units. Members of the other major public workers union, the Civil Service Employees Association, are at least temporarily being spared from the chopping block after it tentatively agreed to a contract that included cost-saving concessions. CSEA members still need to ratify their deal, with results expected to be tallied in August.
The official who discussed Thursday's layoff notices said they could be rescinded if the various unions involved worked out similar agreements with the state in the three weeks remaining before actual termination notices are issued.
Indications are that the job losses range in number from one person at the state Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control to 199 at the Department of Transportation. PEF and negotiators for Governor Andrew Cuomo met Wednesday, and were scheduled to meet again on Thursday.
Cuomo has maintained that if PEF and other unions agree to concessions, the job cuts could be avoided altogether. The budget for the current fiscal year (which ends April 1, 2012) calls for $450 million in negotiated workforce savings. Initially, the governor said 9,800 could be laid off as a last resort, although that number drops if the 4,500 CSEA workers are kept out of the mix.
About 130,000 workers are under the governor's control.
"Employees whose positions are eliminated through a Reduction-in-Force will be notified in writing no later than the end of June," stated a message posted the Department of Transportation's website.
News of the layoffs comes as PEF was conducting an online survey of it members, posing questions about their attitude toward the particulars of the CSEA agreement, which includes three years with no broad-based salary increases and health insurance givebacks.
Agency heads have been looking at a list of 14,312 titles that could potentially be eliminated in various agencies.
The last layoff notices in New York went out to state workers in early December, when former Gov. David Paterson called for roughly 900 reductions after trying to prod unions to offer concessions before the expiration of their contracts.
DEC working on gas drilling rules:
The state will not release the final draft gas drilling regulations to the public on Friday — even though Gov. Andrew Cuomo asked for the proposed rules by then. The document he gets won't be the one that goes out for review."It is not necessarily the final draft form that will be presented for comment," DEC spokesman Michael Bopp recently said of the document, the Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement, that will ultimately regulate the controversial horizontal drilling method of "fracking."
"We will meet the directive Friday," added DEC spokeswoman Emily De Santis. "The details of the public release are still being worked out."
Regardless of when the document is released, after three years of work, forces on both sides of the contentious issue have already drawn lines in the Marcellus shale, which sits beneath the Southern Tier. Anti-drillers want fracking banned. They say it will pollute the pristine water of rural places like Sullivan, even though some experts say the gas beneath much of the county isn't worth drilling.
"Anything short of a prohibition in the Catskills, including the Delaware watershed, is inadequate," says Ramsay Adams, executive director of Catskill Mountainkeeper.
Drilling advocates say they've waited long enough for the economic benefits that drilling can bring to poor places like Sullivan. They point to decades of gas-drilling safety in New York State under strict regulations.
"New York's natural gas industry has an extraordinary safety record and a proven record of environmental protection," says Deborah Fasser, spokeswoman for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York.
Teachers sue over new state ratings system:
New York's new teacher-evaluation system -- designed to rate them based in part on student scores in reading and math -- is in jeopardy after the state teachers union filed a lawsuit challenging its legality.
The lawsuit, filed yesterday in State Supreme Court in Albany, signals a major rift in cooperation between the union and the state Education Department -- which had worked together to win nearly $700 million in federal funds through the Race to the Top competition.
Now New York State United Teachers says the evaluation system violates a state law -- mainly because it lets districts double the weight given to student achievement on state tests.
The 2010 law said the tests could count toward 20 percent of a teacher's rating, and other locally developed assessments would count toward an additional 20 percent. But the Board of Regents amended that language to say districts could use student scores on state math and reading tests as 40 percent of a teacher's rating -- despite questions about the reliability of those exams in recent years.
Education Department spokesman Jonathan Burman said the evaluation system was a "critical foundation" for ensuring that every classroom has a highly effective teacher.
"We have every confidence that it will be upheld by the courts," Burman said.
The office will be closed on Fridays starting tomorrow until Labor Day but, as always, Glenn is available by cell.
Happy 4th of July!!
