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Not The Best Budget Deal Perhaps, But Not A Dog Either
My apologies to the dogs. Governor Paterson, Speaker Silver and Majority Leader Smith have struck a deal on NYS’s budget. In a number of ways, read for yourself, it's not great but it is a significant improvement over the rotten Paterson proposals which were aimed entirely at harming lower and moderate income New Yorkers and protecting higher income residents. Robert Harding writing in The Albany Project picked up the press release in full and the State Senate provided hot links to the actual budget bills for those committed to self-abuse (Thanks to Liz Benjamin who posted the link). The negotiations were carried out completely behind closed doors to the disappointment of reform-minded folk who’d hoped for a cleaner process. See Amy Traub's spirited defense of the broad outlines of the budget on the DMI blog (with which I agree). Also check out the NY Times budget critique favors better spending controls. They're both right. The coalition, with which I worked, One New York: Fighting For Fairness, favored IDA reform and saving money via school district merger among other budget cutting measures for which no political traction could be gotten. We need to refocus state spending and that was not done in this budget. There's a ton of work to do.
Unresolved, at this moment, MTA financing for which $1.5 billion, at an absolute minimum is needed.
Re: Not The Best Budget Deal Perhaps, But Not A Dog Either
Laws and sausages.
I am heading toward the conclusion that one major reason for the closed doors is that public hearings, especially where the public is allowed to testify (they aren't always, or can be limited in various ways) often result in a bunch of people taking far too long to fail to make a point about something they want. Then, once the hearings are over and the decisions are made, they are generally made without regard to what went on in the hearing. The committee reports for City Council hearings are written before the hearing is held!
Every time I testified before the City Council I kept my testimony under the two-minute limit, and still managed to make my point. Conversely, I saw many people going way over the limit, with pages of testimony (often they were cut off after three minutes or more), rambling on and on -- it's ridiculous. What's worse, that kind of behavior almost begs elected officials to ignore what is said at the hearings -- which they usually do. I can only think of one hearing that changed minds -- it was about a bill that the major and committee chair planned to slip quickly through the system, but because of the turnout at the hearing the bill was effectively killed.
President Obama's foreign policy team is talking about a "Reset" button; perhaps we need a reset button on public hearings, both in City Hall and in Albany. Hearings should be held before decisions are made, and someone should sift through the testimony, separating the wheat from the chaff -- and ask people who made good points in the limited time they were allotted (demonstrating that they have something constructive to say, and have facts to back up their assertions) to expand on their point.
If budget deals and other bills weren't passed without open committee hearings, we'd know much more about how decisions are made. If a committee held two public hearings on each issue, the first open to anyone, and the second by invitation only, real ideas could flow to the people making decisions. If committee reports weren't written until after the hearings, and took into account the testimony given at those hearings, the process of real reform could begin.
Of course, that's a lot of "ifs."
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