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Reform in New York: The Budget, the Legislature, and the Governance Process
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Benjamin, Gerald |
| Copyright Year | 2004 |
| Abstract | I. INTRODUCTION New York once prided itself as being a leader in governance among the states. Now mediocrity is the norm. One fifty-state study is particularly revealing. In 2001, Governing magazine, in collaboration with the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, graded the states in five key areas of government performance: Financial Management, Capital Management, Human Resources, Managing for Results, and Information Technology. New York received a "C+" average, and no grade higher than a "B." (1) Those who prefer to think of the glass as half full might be encouraged by the improvement over the state's "C-" average reported two years earlier. (2) But New York's improved Governing Grade Point Average, "GPA", was helped by a higher grade in Financial Management. (3) Knowing this, it would be understandable if those attentive to New York's fiscal practices and condition concluded that the state's movement from C- to C+ was evidence not of progress, but of grade inflation. New York's fiscal practices have been regularly criticized by the Citizens Budget Commission and others. Recurring state revenues do not cover recurring expenses. State budgets are "balanced" by extensive use of one shots, borrowing, movement of programs and activities off budget, and displacement of costs onto localities. This latter practice, along with a failure to address the state's complex overlapping arrangements for local governance, has resulted in one of the highest average per capita local property tax burdens in the nation. (4) In reaction to both the process and results of budgeting in New York, national rating agencies again downgraded state bonds in the summer of 2003. (5) New York's are now among the lowest rated in the nation. (6) More than any other single factor, the consistent lateness of the state budget has become a metaphor for the dysfunction in New York State government. The regularity of late adoption of the state budget in Albany--twenty years in a row--is annually grist for editorialists' mills and has become a leading symbol of state governmental nonperformance. The 2001-02 and 2002-03 fiscal years were, some said, the worst for the American states since World War II ("WWII"). Virtually all states experienced serious revenue shortfalls. The resultant fiscal stress engendered a number of late state budgets. But in almost all the states--unlike in New York--budget deadlock has not been the norm. In a recent paper, Dall Forsythe and Donald Boyd indicated that only California has, in recent years, had late budgets with a frequency similar to that of New York. (7) But California is constrained in budgeting by the results of statewide initiatives that significantly limit legislative discretion by mandating spending and limiting taxation. (8) There is no initiative process in New York that has produced tax limits and spending requirements. Moreover, while New York limits state government discretion in borrowing--through a constitutional referendum requirement authorizing general obligation borrowing--the legislature and governor have found numerous ways around it. New York budgets were regularly adopted far in advance of the beginning of the state fiscal year until the mid-1960s--though more time was required during the Harriman administration (1955-58), when partisan control of the government was divided, than in years of Republican control of the governorship and both legislative houses. (9) The first late budget in the post-WWII era came in 1965, during the Nelson Rockefeller governorship, after reapportionment and the Johnson landslide in the presidential election gave control of the legislature to the Democrats. (10) Budgets became consistently late following the mid-1970's fiscal crisis. (11) The average time between the opening of the fiscal year and adoption of the budget has lengthened, and indeed has come to exceed that in California, (12) as techniques have been developed in New York to allow the State to operate for months without a budget in place. … |
| Starting Page | 1021 |
| Ending Page | 1021 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 67 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://cbcny.org/sites/default/files/report_reformnys_11102003.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
