ALBANY
LIKE Nero fiddling while Rome burned, Gov. Pataki and the leaders of the Legislature are fiddling – and fibbing – while New York’s local governments crumble – literally and figuratively – under the weight of out-of-control state Medicaid, tax, environmental and other burdensome policies.
With just six weeks to go to the start of the state’s fiscal year, Pataki (when he is in Albany) and the legislative leaders appear less concerned with fixing those polices than they are about achieving a public relations victory, a so-called “on-time” budget.
But even if Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Rensselaer) and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) succeed in passing the first such budget in 20 years – as now appears possible – their “success” will amount to little more than election-year bragging rights and a colossal PR hoax. That’s because the kind of business-as-usual budget the state leaders are now considering will bring many of New York’s most important and historic cities and counties to the brink of collapse.
Consider:
Schenectady, once the great beacon of high-technology and center of General Electric creativity, is so close to collapse that state Comptroller Alan Hevesi has actually set a date – sometime in May – for its bankruptcy.
Syracuse, once a central New York economic powerhouse, is facing its biggest budget gap in history and a potential and devastating 45 percent property-tax hike. Its school-system is already making massive layoffs.
Rochester, another early high-tech center with its highly educated workforce, is facing massive Kodak layoffs and is in a crisis spiral involving crime and a record population loss.
Buffalo, once the great center of commerce and industry on Lake Erie, once the upstate symbol of New York’s greatest and a beacon to the entire Midwest of the Empire State’s economic prowess, lies bankrupt and broken.
Things are so bad that last week Buffalo’s mayor put aside what must surely have been heartbreak to publicly call for the city’s dissolution and its merger with Erie County.
Albany, the state Capitol, is beset by crumbling neighborhoods, skyrocketing property taxes and runaway crime.
Many once vibrant Hudson River cities – Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Hudson, Catskill – sit rotting and on the brink of financial despair.
Westchester County last week lost its best-in-the-state AAA bond rating from Fitch Ratings, despite a last-ditch effort (a near-20 percent property-tax hike, plus other tax increases) to save it.
Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, warning of grave fiscal problems, announced earlier this month that he was facing the largest deficit in history, a projected $235 million shortfall in 2005.
Meanwhile, a new study on Long Island population trends found that the key-to-the-future 18- to 34-year-old population group dropped a whopping 20 percent through the decade ending in 2000 – five times the rate of national population decline.
The study (called the Long Island Index 2004) also found that 5 percent of the area’s 24- to 35-year-olds – 18,000 people – packed up and moved off Long Island in 2001 alone.
“It is very very grim,” said Fitch Ratings Senior Director Jessalynn Moro, who is responsible for setting the bond ratings for local governments in New York, New Jersey and throughout New England.
“From a credit perspective, New York is absolutely the worst.”
Pataki and the legislative leaders – who continue to raise state spending to record levels and slap more mandates on local governments – still insist that prosperity is just around the corner, if we just wait a while longer.
But such rosy assessments are being rejected by increasingly anxious and vocal local officials, as well as corporate executives with the power to relocate their business.
A state Business Council official noted last week that while nationwide employment in the critical securities industry grew slightly in 2003, it declined by nearly 3,000 jobs in New York. And while manufacturing employment fell nationwide during one recent cycle by 3.4 percent, in New York the drop was 4.4 percent.
“It simply cannot be that every municipal official, regardless of party or geography, are all high-taxing, reckless spenders who have no regard for seniors on a fixed income and are intent on preventing new businesses from locating in our communities,” says reform-minded Nassau County Executive Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat. “There must be something we share in common and there is: New York state government.”
That seems to be a view that nearly everyone close to state government is coming to these days – everyone, of course, except Pataki, Bruno and Silver.
Fredric U. Dicker is The Post’s State Editor.
