The governor, the lawmakers and the budget

June will go down in history as the month in which Governor Paterson divorced himself from his uneasy relationship with the state Legislature and took over all of its powers and duties in order to pass a budget for New York.

In mid-January, when the governor proposed his new budget, no one could have predicted that in the end he would have more to say about state spending than the members of the state Assembly and the Senate. There is an old expression among Albany observers: “The governor proposes and the Legislature disposes.” Not this year.

The original Paterson budget made sharp cuts in heretofore-sacred aid to education, hospitals, health care and local assistance. The usual complaints were heard from representatives of all of these groups, who conducted their traditional campaigns, urging elected officials to ignore the governor and do their traditional thing, reversing all of his proposals.

By law, a new budget is required to be adopted on April 1, but that not-so-sacred date came and went and the two houses were unable to agree on anything. Democrats in the Senate, with a majority of only two, have a completely different agenda than the Assembly, in which Democrats rule by an overwhelming margin. In the Senate, every Democrat is a power broker, capable in one swift moment of stopping the chamber from functioning.

The impasse over the budget is simple to understand. The state started the year with a $9.5 billion deficit, and it takes a lot of effort and courage to find that much money in cuts of state agencies and programs. The federal government threw quite a few dollars at New York state last year in stimulus funds, and the state took every penny and spent it. So, with no federal help and no help from anyone else, the Legislature was paralyzed on the day it was supposed to pass a budget.

A late budget isn’t usually a crisis, because the Legislature has been late in passing budgets for the past 15 years. In past years, after a lot of huffing and puffing and manipulation of the numbers, the two houses have passed a budget. But finding more than $9 billion hasn’t been easy.

The first target that the Legislature chose for revenue was the tobacco industry. An increase in taxes of $1.60 per pack of cigarettes helped raise $460 million. That was a good start, but after that increase was approved, there wasn’t much left to tax. In May, Long Island school districts and other districts around the state went to taxpayers with their proposed budgets and, luckily, few budgets were defeated.

Most of the school districts assumed that there would eventually be a state budget, and they estimated how much they would get in state aid. The schools, like hospitals and countless others, were in for a real shock when, by the end of May, there was still no state budget and not even the smell of a compromise.

For most of this year, Paterson has been a silent partner in a tricky three-way marriage. But every so often someone reads the state constitution and realizes that under extraordinary circumstances, if there is no state budget, the governor takes over the process and sends emergency budget extenders to the Legislature with the threat that the state will shut down if they are not approved.

For almost the entire month of June, Paterson reigned supreme, getting every piece of the budget approved with his ideas and his cuts. Program after program and sacred cow after sacred cow was slashed. For most of the process, the Legislature sat back in a state of shock, unable to find a way to save their priorities.

The events of the past six months are a warning to future Legislatures that their failure to act on a budget in a timely manner creates the opportunity for the governor to intervene and create his own fiscal plan. When the history of this year’s legislative session is written, the best way to describe it will be “Divorce Albany-style.”

Jerry Kremer was a state assemblyman for 23 years, and chaired the Assembly’s Ways and Means Committee for 12 years. He now heads Empire Government Strategies, a business development and legislative strategy firm. Comments about this column? JKremer@liherald.com.