Gov. David Paterson, center, Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, left, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver prepare for a legislative leaders meeting at the Capitol in Albany on Tuesday.
ALBANY Gov. David Paterson and more than 200 legislators met in emergency session today to take on what they agreed was a fiscal crisis of historic proportions — and did nothing.
A 90-minute meeting of the Democratic governor and legislative leaders was filled with accusations and some name calling, but they failed to approach any agreement on Paterson’s proposed $5 billion in spending cuts or any alternatives, some of which surfaced for the first time in the leaders’ meeting.
“They swung and missed,” said Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group.
In the end, Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos achieved what he wanted against the Democratic governor, the Democratic speaker of the Assembly and the Democratic Senate leader who is in line to control that chamber’s majority beginning Jan. 1. Skelos got Paterson to suspend any cuts in the current budget, which has a projected $1.5 billion to $2 billion deficit, until January.
Skelos had said the midyear cuts shouldn’t be made without having the governor’s full proposal for the 2009-10 fiscal year in hand.
Paterson plans to present that budget to the Legislature Dec. 16, a month early because of the fiscal crisis he says will create $47 billion in deficits over the next three years because of the meltdown on Wall Street, too little return of tax revenue from Washington, and what he describes as years of overspending by the state to benefit special interests.
9:15 p.m. [ Suggest removal ]
It's business as usual. Actors accomplishing nothing. How bad does it have to get before they will get real?