State Senator Roy McDonald of Saratoga County apparently has decided not to run an aggressive re-election campaign on the Independence Party line after losing a closely-contested primary for the Republican nomination.
What a shame. We need more people like Senator McDonald in Albany, and in every facet of civic life. Read More
The Committee to Save New York has a number of laudable goals in mind, goals that this page shares. Committee members, many of whom are well-placed among New York’s civic and business leaders, have sought to win public support for political and fiscal reform in Albany, reforms desperately needed if New York is going to prosper in the 21st century.
It’s clear that the committee has struck a nerve—it was able to raise $17 million last year, and it spent $12 million. No doubt you’ve seen the committee’s television ads, and if they seem like campaign commercials for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, well, that’s not a coincidence. Many of the committee’s leaders, including co-chair Rob Speyer, have close ties to the governor. The governor’s agenda and the committee’s are one and the same.
Here’s the problem: If the committee truly is serious about changing the dysfunctional culture of state government, if it is, in fact, in favor of greater transparency in political decision-making, if it really wants to set an example, it simply cannot continue to play by the old rules.
But it is doing just that. Read More
Parks funding is something of an obsession around these parts, particularly those open spaces The Observer has deemed libertarian parks, spaces ranging from Brooklyn Bridge Park to the High Line, which are either built or maintained with outside funds. On the one hand, these parks might never have been created without private investment.
On the other, it shows a troubling lack of respect and appreciation for the public trust—where would the city be if the same we-just-can’t-afford-’em attitude of today persisted in the past? Central Park, Prospect Park, Pelham Bay Park, even the controversial work of Robert Moses, would any of it have happened if it had been undertaken by private interests?
Hudson River Park, first proposed in the 1980s, launched a decade later and by all accounts the first libertarian park, has been facing funding shortfalls for years now, hindering the ability of parks officials to finish construction of many of the piers and maintaining the ones it has already redeveloped. Read More
For the past few weeks, longshot “Occupy” Senate candidate Scott Noren has been at war with the state politics blog and TV show Capital Tonight with angry ads on Albany politics sites and supposedly plans to fly a plane over the capitol. Today, Mr. Noren published a series of emails he claims inspired the feud. Mr. Noren became enraged with Capital Tonight host Liz Benjamin, one of the pre-eminent reporters on the Albany beat, after receiving what he described as a “less than professional” response from her following “several attempts to get media coverage on Capital Tonight.”
“You have come across as the most arrogant local newscaster I have ever encountered,” Mr. Noren wrote in the missive he released today. Read More
Governor Andrew Cuomo says that if the teachers union continues to obstruct the implementation of a new, robust evaluation system for teachers and principals by Thursday, he’ll act on his own and impose a system. That’s precisely what he ought to do.
The showdown still was underway at press time, but regardless of whether or not the governor and the union reach an agreement, a larger point remains: Once again, the teachers union, emboldened by its allies in the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, has resisted efforts to bring accountability into the classroom.
Unlike his fellow Democrats in the Assembly, Mr. Cuomo has shown that he understands the reactionary role the teachers union continues to play against the effort to bring much-needed reform to poor-performing school districts. Mr. Cuomo is acting on behalf of poorly served students and their parents. The union, of course, is simply trying to protect incompetent teachers. Read More
Say this about Governor Cuomo: He is not one to dampen expectations. Having delivered tax reform, gay marriage and new union contracts during his first year in office, the governor is looking for even bigger achievements in his second year—which happens to coincide with state legislative elections. Albany’s traditional embrace of the status quo is never tighter than when legislators are up for re-election, which makes the governor’s ambitions even more notable. Read More
Increasingly it seems like New York, which we sometimes think of as a world leader in governmental dysfunction, may well be a shining city on a hill when compared with Washington, D.C.
Even as Albany continues to bask in the glow of a newly passed tax reform package, even as the city sets a course to leadership in the 21st-century economy, the folks on Capitol Hill simply cannot put aside their partisan bickering for the good of the country. Doing so risks further damage to a less-than-robust economy, and thus making life worse, not better, for those individuals and families still suffering from unemployment and underemployment.
For a moment over the weekend, it seemed as though Washington was about to take a page from Albany. Read More
Charles Komanoff, the hound of Manhattan traffic, penned an interesting column yesterday for Streetsblog arguing that the Occupy movement had the potential to bring congestion pricing back to life.
After all, the protesters, with their message of pervasive inequality, arguably helped put enough pressure on the Cuomo administration to embrace some form of higher taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers. Why couldn’t some form of populist support do the same for tolls on East River bridges and the subsequent boost to clean air and mass transit that would come with it? Read More
Members of Albany’s second-largest public employees union, the Public Employees Federation, clearly had second thoughts about challenging Governor Cuomo over wage and benefit concessions. Mr. Cuomo said that if P.E.F. didn’t accept $450 million in concessions, he’d have no choice but to lay off 3,500 P.E.F. members.
At first, P.E.F. basically told the governor to do his worst. Perhaps members thought Mr. Cuomo was bluffing, which, if nothing else, shows that the union is not necessarily blessed with keen political insight. Mr. Cuomo was not bluffing. When that became clear, the P.E.F. basically ordered up a do-over. Members have now voted overwhelmingly in favor of the deal they rejected just over a month ago.
That’s good news for many people, but most of all for the 3,500 P.E.F. members whose jobs have been saved by the second thoughts of their brothers and sisters. Apparently there is something to be said about “solidarity forever,” after all. Read More
Governor Cuomo promised to make Albany, including the governor’s office, more transparent and accessible. With the introduction of a new website, publication of his daily schedule and on-line chats, he is fulfilling that promise—although full transparency in Albany remains an elusive but necessary goal.
Mr. Cuomo hosted his first on-line chat on Sept. 24 (with the help of his fast-typing press aide, Josh Vlasto), answering questions from citizens on a range of political and personal topics, from the future of the Indian Point nuclear plant to his affection for the Executive Mansion on Eagle Street. The session may not have produced any startling exchanges, but it did show that Mr. Cuomo is serious about embracing 21st-century technology to keep in touch with his constituents. Read More
