Elana from DMI has a great post over at The Albany Project, pointing out that while New York's legislators are debating ticket scalping and whether sweet corn should be the official state vegetable, quite a few more weighty concerns -- from welfare policy to predatory lending to to family leave (see also Steve WFP's excellent report from the Family Leave Roundtable in Schenectady) -- are waiting to be addressed. She also puts in a plug for DMI's new report:

Some of the issues New York is struggling to handle -- subsidy reform, what to do with criminals when they are released from prison, providing universal access to preschool and the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs -- are real challenges but they aren't insurmountable. In fact four localities around the country did tackle these battles with great success. Want to know more?

Our new report "Lessons from the Marketplace: Four Proven Progressive Policies from DMI’s Marketplace of Ideas
(And how New York can do them even better)" reveals how it all was achieved.

Come meet some of our new State Legislators and get to the know the Manhattan Young Dems!

MYD SPRING SOCIAL
“A New Era in Local Politics” Spring Social
Wednesday, April 11th, 7 PM
Senator Bill Perkins
Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh
Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal
INVITED GUESTS

Dewey’s Flatiron
210 5th Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets
[Take the N, R to 23rd Street or 6 to 23rd Street]

COST: $5 (members) $10 (non-members)
Featuring a 50/50 raffle with Great Prizes, Drink Specials

At the Observer, Azi Paybarah brings us a depressing example of how Albany's anti-democratic culture has taken hostage the hearts and minds of so many in our state government. Paybarah interviews 72-year-old Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio (D-Queens), whose review of the budget battle is so cynical you can feel your soul melting as you read it:

“Eliot may wish he had another way, but there’s only one way the budget is ever going to get done, son,” said Mr. Seminerio, sitting by himself in the Assembly chambers Saturday night, hours before the budget deadline. “It’s three people, each getting a piece of the pie, and that’s it.”

[...]

“I don’t know if he learned anything,” Mr. Seminerio said. “I can’t speak for the Governor. I think maybe he understands the process a little better. I think, like everything else, he’ll learn. You know what I’m saying. He’ll learn. And it’s not that he did anything wrong. He thought the process should be done one way, and he thought, you know, he could accomplish it. And now I think he must understand—I can’t speak for him, certainly; you know he’s a brilliant man. I can’t speak for him—but I think he understands now that, hey, you have to sit down, and it’s a give-and-take.”

Waving his left arm in the air toward the empty room, Mr. Seminerio added: “The only thing that ever changes in Albany are the faces. The system stays intact.”

Don't fight it, son. Just take the pills like everyone else and soon you'll see it's all for the best.

While the actual budget outcomes are not really known yet, some of the winners are: Long Island school districts got lots more money, Westchester school districts didn't. Indeed, when the Assembly voted on the Education budget, all Westchester Assembly Members (mostly Democrats) voted "No". Monday's NY Times features a good story by Danny Hakim and David Herzenhorn which lays out how LI won and Westchester lost. The victorious statements of the Alliance For Quality Education & Campaign for Fiscal Equity are after the jump.

In addition, advocates of smaller class size in New York City (including me) were successful, it appears in that some language requiring smaller classes made it through the final budget. UPDATE: I ran into UFT Lobby and political people Monday morning who were jubilant and absolutely certain that the class-size language would result in actually smaller classes. NYC will have to build classroom space to accommodate the new classes. There are, unhappily, no fixed targets for class size reduction, so this battle may have to be fought over and over again.

Queens Assembly Member Rory I. Lacmann, who, with Education Chair Cathy Nolan, led the charge on behalf of smaller class size, reports as follows:

" Over Mayor Bloomberg’s fierce resistance, NYC will be required to reduce its overcrowded class sizes under the budget passed today by the state legislature (A.4307-C), a priority of the Assembly throughout the budget negotiations. Specifically, NYC is required to execute a plan to reduce class size over five years, to be enforced by the New York State Commissioner of Education."

Does this mean that your children and mine will actually get smaller classes?

The Sun reports that marriage equality is making gains in Albany - but the Senate remains a roadblock.

According to the article, Gov. Spitzer seems to be ready to make a push for legalization of gay marriage after the budget fight is over, and it's looking increasingly likely that the Assembly will go along:

The Empire State Pride Agenda, a leading gay advocacy group in New York, says 54 members of the 150-person Assembly have expressed support for a gay marriage bill, up from 35 when it polled the chamber in September.

"We think it has a real shot of passing in the Assembly this year," the executive director of the Empire State Pride Agenda, Alan Van Capelle, told The New York Sun.

One of those 54 Assembly members is Richard Brodsky, a Democrat who represents a district in Westchester. Mr. Brodsky said he senses that support for a bill is growing in his conference. "I think the prejudice is diminishing. People are thinking about it in reasonable terms," he said.

Brodsky's in the weeds on Albany reform, but he's got the right idea civil rights, it seems.

However, not only would a marriage equality bill die in Joe Bruno's Senate, it might not fare much better in a Democratic Senate, either.

(More below the fold...)

Tuesday, I went to Albany with the Chancellor’s Parents’ Advisory Council (C-PAC?), the UFT and the Principal’s Union to lobby legislators on behalf of smaller classes for public school children about which I will I write more later.

In the course of the day, we got a funny lesson in the manners and mores of the legislature.

The Senate and Assembly were set to vote on members of the Board of Regents, the group which hires the Education Commission. As a practical matter, the positions are in the gift of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, since Assembly Democrats make up the majority of the combined body. As they went to vote for the new members of this crucial body, none of the Senators and Assembly members I spoke to knew who Mr. Silver intended to nominate (elect). After the vote, none of those I spoke to knew anything about those for whom they voted.

One of them, CUNY Law School Professor Natalie Gomez-Velez is, in my view, an excellent choice: smart, focused, funny, light on her feet in debate; we schmoozed with her after her election. She represents the Bronx on the Panel on Education Policy and used to work for the Brennan Center.

The other is someone none of the elected officials I spoke with had ever heard of.

Candidates to fill the late John Lavelle’s State Assembly seat, the openly Gay Matt Titone and Kelvin Alexander, a co-founder of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care accuse each other’s campaigns of bigotry according to Saturday’s Link TextStaten Island Advance.

Democratic Candidate Titone, who lost to Andrew Lanza in a November State Senate bid, has been challenging Alexander, the Independence Party candidate (But still a member of County Democratic Committee) and Democratic Brooklyn State Senator Eric Adams ‘s chief of staff’s petition signatures. Not signatures for his Independence candidacy, but those for his made up additional line, the Family First Party (Which has nothing to do with the Working Families Party).

Alexander finished a distant fourth at the Staten Island Democratic Committee’s nominating convention, but anticipating that secured the Independence nomination and began petitioning for his made up party line before the convention.

Alexander ridiculously asserted Titone’s challenging of his Family First Party signatures, many of which were allegedly from non-registered voters and people not living in the district marginalizes blacks, while Titone counters that the word “Family” in Kelvin’s party moniker could be a homophobic code word suggesting that Matt being Gay means he’s anti-family.

At Queens Borough Hall in Kew Gardens, Thursday night, public school advocates, parents, principals and politicians gathered to support the school spending plan proposed by Gov. Eliot Spitzer. The meeting, sponsored by the Alliance for Quality Education, the NAACP, the UFT and New Yorkers For Smaller Classes, featured AQE director Billy Easton and Campaign for Fiscal Equity dirctor Geri Palast who have been at so many meeting together they finish each others sentences.

The task at hand: focus the crowd to pressure Queens GOP Senators Maltese and Padavan to support the Spitzer scheme (which I'll describe below).

The key issue: class size. I think that the reason that Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein don't care about it, and refuse to spend money on it is that they see our children as objects to be processed by the schools not as individuals, each with her or his own needs. Assemby members Nolan and Lancman have introduced a bill to require our Mayor to reduce class size.

The big news: GOP Senator Maltese will support the class size limits. Almost losing his re-election, seems to have woken him up. Senator Padavan is rumored to be supporting the class size intitiative as well.

An overlooked nugget in the reporting on Charlie Rangel's speech to the New York Congressional delegation about Spitzer's budget is this:

Mrs. Clinton, according to people who were in attendance, did not take sides. But she did joke that if the matter could not be settled now, she would “fix it” in 2009.

That's from the 'I may have just gotten re-elected to one job, but don't expect me to actually work for you while I'm angling for my promotion' doctrine. You may recognize it from last year's race in the Eleventh Congressional District, specifically the Yassky and Clarke candidacies. Both of these jumped out of the gate within days of their re-election to a four-year term in the City Council in November 2005. It's quite normal, expected even, for New York politicians to royally shaft their existing constituents as they work for that advancement their shining talents so richly deserve. You poor creature are just a voter, and guess what: you don't really matter so much to the caste of your professional overlords. Now spread 'em; there, that's a good little peon. It may be uncomfortable, but you can certainly vote for Hillary in that position, you know; perhaps more easily so, even.

A variant on this principle is currently playing out in the 40th City Council District, where the Clarkes, mother and daughter, found and backed some pitiable schmuck, a 'doctor' who has never practiced medicine in this country and did not even have the simple, baseline good sense to establish the in-district residency required to take office. The end result is that there's now the need for a new election – no, thank you, Una. We liked the first one so much we're all just thrilled at the repeat – twice the cost, sure, but twice the fun, too.

Parks Department Director of Government Relations and former Yvette Clarke staffer Michael Schnall is hosting a 7PM to 9PM Democratic Candidate Matt Titone dessert fundraiser tonight at his 73 ST. Pauls Avenue Staten Island home.

Mike's residence is fairly close to the Ferry, so this would be a fairly convenient event for those of you afraid to set foot on Staten Island to attend.

Titone, who ran for State Senate in November, seeks to fill the late John Lavelle's assembly seat in the March 27 special election.

For more information contact mikeschnall@gmail.com
To donate online visit Link Textmatthewtitone.com or
Link Textmatthewtitone.net

Joann Mardikos is the campaign's Volunteer Coordinator joannm56@aol.com or 718-816-0842.

Councilman Michael McMahon is hosting a March 13 7:30 PM Matt Titone fundraiser for Titone at Bridget's Public House, 461 Clove Road Staten Island.
Minimum suggested Donation $50, Silver Donor $100
Gold Donor $250, Platinum Donor $500. For information contact the Island's hardest working non-paid Democratic soldier Laura Sword (718)556-3823. laurasword@gmail.com