The overwhelming majority of this year’s budget was forced through the Legislature without any input from the minority conferences and without any input from the people of this state. This budget was crafted behind closed doors and left members of the media scrounging for interviews from the ‘three men in a room.’ This isn’t how an open and transparent government should operate. We have rights as the minority conference. The people have a right to know what’s in their state’s budget. I believe the people of New York would have much preferred a budget be debated openly during the day so they could know exactly where our priorities lie. This budget failed to do that.

Once you realize what is contained in this budget, it’s no wonder that the governor and legislative leaders wanted to keep the public in the dark. This budget is bad for the middle class, local governments, schools, and small businesses. It provides no property tax relief. No mandate relief for our counties. Gov. Cuomo’s ‘Hunger Games’-style upstate competition remained untouched despite requests from me and others to offset the local share of Medicaid. Yet, NYC, Nassau and Suffolk counties are guaranteed a share of $400 million for the same purpose.

We have taken up ‘transformative’ ethics changes in this budget that fail to transform anything. The ethics bill has been on our desks for less than half-a-day and is reminiscent of the prior deals on ethics reform which failed to change Albany for the better. It’s really just a sound bite that soon will be forgotten until the next political corruption case explodes in Albany.

For the long-term, this bill puts too many funds at the discretion of the governor, and not enough discretion in the hands of local officials. The slush funds and projects the executive controls are your typical central planning, and as we all know, central planning has failed and will continue to fail as long as it is tried.