"It's a real mess," said Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch, speaking on Tuesday afternoon about the budget situation in Albany. "And that is something you already know," he added, half smiling, half wincing. "The second thing you need to know," he said, "is that everything they are doing, the longer they put off making cuts, the longer they take to decide, it amounts to deferral, it amounts to more borrowing."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is expected to unveil his budget proposal today , and he will have to do that without knowing how much money the city will get from the state in the coming fiscal year. Already the Bloomberg administration contends Albany's proposals would slash about $1.3 billion from the city, including massive cuts to education aid. (The state puts the figure at around $1 billion.)
The likely scenario for tomorrow is that the mayor will budget conservatively in the face of the state's fiscal crisis and inability to reach agreement on the budget. The state budget already is over a month late, and while the principals insist they are working as hard as possible to come to a deal, there aren't many signs that one is imminent.
"The mayor is going to have to decide whether to be conservative or optimistic in his budget estimates," said Ravitch, "In this case I don't think it would be appropriate for him to be optimistic."
Earlier in the year, Ravitch proposed a plan that would have instituted new accounting measures and allowed for borrowing to balance the budget, with certain strict guidelines. The Senate and Gov. David Paterson have rejected the plan, while the Assembly seems keen on borrowing -- whether they want unrestricted borrowing or Ravitch's plan is unclear.
But that is not the only source of tension. The Senate is said to be pushing hard for "property tax relief." (Don't call it a cut or you will be quickly corrected.) Many see the move as a bid to win support from suburban and upstate districts heading into an election season. The Assembly is apparently more concerned with reducing Paterson's proposed cuts to education and health care. Any type of property tax relief would benefit upstate and suburban areas where more people own property, while restoring education and health cuts would more likely benefit the city.
Meanwhile, the state's finances are growing bleaker by the day.
The state is expected to run out of cash by June unless a budget is put in place. In June, a number of payments to school districts and other groups that Paterson deferred earlier this year will come due. The state owes $4.1 billion to schools, including new and deferred payments. The budget office estimates the state will be $1 billion short. There is talk among legislators that the state could borrow to make the payments, but Ravitch says it's unclear whether borrowing is legal when there is no budget in place. "This cash flow crisis in June is very real," he said.
It isn't exactly uncommon for the state budget to be late. The legislature has passed an on-time budget only five times since 1975. Lately, budgets have come in closer to the March 31 due date: Last year, the budget was about a day late. But things are different this year. Besides the extremely narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, a lame duck governor and election season just around the bend, the state faces a rapidly increasing $9 billion budget deficit.
Outside Ravitch's office last Tuesday around 3 P.M. the session bells are ringing, but no one is answering them. Advocates and lobbyists wait outside the senate chamber; inside the seats are all empty. "Think they are gonna do anything today?" asks a staffer, "I wouldn't bet on it," replies another. The Senate will consider real legislation today, but the budget is not on the agenda. "It's like [the movie] Groundhog Day here," says another staffer, "Every day is the same as the last."
Sen. Ruben Diaz stands on the Democratic side of the Senate chamber, looking confused. "Where is everyone?" he asks of a staff member. He declines to discuss how the budget mess could affect New York. "Ask the guys upstairs," he says refering to Paterson, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Senate Democratic Conference Leader John Sampson and other senior legislators who are involved in budget negotiations.
Senate Finance Chair Carl Kruger hasn't disclosed much about the budget negotiations. He tells Republican Sen. John DeFrancisco that talks are so sensitive that details can't be discussed in deference to the other side. Republicans have raged that the Democrats have completely ignored rules that require conference committees with members of the Assembly and Senate from both parties to hash out the budget in public.
In response, Democrats last month invited the Republicans to a five-way leaders meeting on the budget. The Republicans declined, claiming the invitation was only a charade.
DeFrancisco insists that Republicans have not been consulted on the budget and is certain that the Democratic leadership will simply dump the final proposal in their laps one day and schedule a vote on it hours later. It happened that way last year.
Standing outside of the office of Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos, Kruger, grimacing, said "The budget is a moving target. We've had three-way negotiations; we had five-way negotiations."
As to what it means for the city, he continued, "The city could lose millions of dollars. We would like to restore some of that, but each conference has their own priorities. When we had money, it was about who gets how much. Now it's about who gets enough."
The city may well have an ace in the hole in the negotiations. As Republican leaders constantly point out, all of the key players at the negotiating table represent New York City, and it is an election year.
"I think it is unfortunate that a lot of municipalities will have to make conservative estimates, but we hope to get this budget done soon, and hopefully they will get to move those estimates up," said Sen. Kevin Parker.
In the meantime, though, the state is left with stopgaps. So far, Paterson has proposed -- and the legislature has passed -- bare bones budget extenders. More almost certainly will be needed.
With each extender, Paterson is expected to introduce more ways to save the state money. The legislature is likely to accept them, because members are afraid to vote against something that will keep the state government running. Most recently, Paterson introduced a measure that will furlough 100,000 state workers for one day a week, without pay. It is expected to save the state $30 million a day. But union heads question the legality of the furloughs and are expect to challenge them in court.
Other emergency actions Paterson has taken, such as discontinuing payments for construction projects on state owned roads and bridges, are being contested in the courts and the legislature. Contractor groups are suing the state to restore funding and unions representing state workers are expected to sue the state if the furloughs go through. Most of those measures are expected to be repealed once a budget is adopted. Paterson has requested that legislators stay in Albany five days a week to at least keep up the appearance that budget negotiations are a priority.
On Wednesday, legislators held their morning session and departed for their districts.
At this point if you want to know when you can expect a budget deal, as Diaz said, you should ask the guys upstairs.
They probably won't tell you.
Given the gloomy budget and economy forecasts of a year or even several months ago, New York City has emerged in remarkably good shape, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office's Analysis of the Mayor's Preliminary Budget for 2011. In sharp contrast to alarming stories of huge current and future deficits in New York, New Jersey and many other states across the nation, the budget office's New York City story offers much good news.
That includes a budget surplus of nearly $3 billion for the current fiscal year, a city recession much milder than expected and milder than the last two recessions, a solid preliminary budget for 2011, and long-term budget prospects that are much more optimistic than the mayor's. Little gloom, no doom.
The city's fiscal condition is the result of some good luck -- especially a lot of federal aid and an unexpectedly quick Wall Street turnaround. It can also be attributed to a succession of major budget actions by the Bloomberg administration: agency budget cuts that began in April 2007 and have been repeated in every financial plan since, and increasingly regressive tax policies.
The report places the fiscal good news in a larger social, economic, and political context that helps identify the budget’s winners and losers.
The recession did not get as bad here as many had feared it would. The Independent Budget Office acknowledges that it, like the mayor's Office of Management and Budget and other fiscal monitors, was way off in forecasting the depth of the recession in the city. The city indeed lost a lot of jobs -- 172,900, with an unemployment rate that jumped from less than 5 percent to 10.4 percent in January -- but far fewer than the 254,500 lost jobs the Independent Budget Office projected a year ago.
It also is far below the 228,600 jobs lost in the 2001-2003 recession and the 357,500 in the 1989-1992 recession. From 1970 to 1977, which the budget office calls a "period of brutal structural change" that included New York's great fiscal crisis, the city lost 635,200 jobs.
Fewer job losses mean less lost revenue. At the same time, the federal bailout of the nation's financial institutions played a key role in boosting revenue. The surprise was how quickly Wall Street firms reported profits -- $61.4 billion in 2009 -- which almost totally erased their $62.7 billion in losses over the previous year and a half. Those profits translate into higher business and personal income taxes for the city and account for much of the nearly $3 billion surplus for the current fiscal year ending June 30.
The surplus also came from the city's use of $600 million in reserves and accounting adjustments that a conservative Office of Management and Budget typically sets up each year and nearly $500 million of new agency cuts in the last half of this fiscal year. This fiscal year -- as in the past several years -- surpluses form the previous year also played a role. Without the use of these surpluses, expenditures would be $2.7 billion higher than revenues this fiscal year and $2.8 billion higher next fiscal year, according to the Independent Budget Office.
The repeated use of $3 billion or more of surpluses in one fiscal year to prepay the next year's expenditures has given the mayor unusual flexibility in budget balancing. It has become a kind of rolling "rainy day fund" that once raised eyebrows among fiscal monitors and the City Council for its expansion of mayoral budget powers, but now seems generally accepted.
The economic and fiscal news is so good, in fact, that fears that the surpluses will finally end because of the recession seem unwarranted. Although the Independent Budget Office currently projects a surplus in 2011 of just over $100 million, it also foresees future budget deficits that are extraordinarily small when compared to the mayor's -- and its own -- forecasts in recent years.
For instance, the mayor currently projects a $3.7 billion deficit in 2013, but the budget office projects only a $1.8 billion deficit. A year ago, the mayor projected a $4.2 billion deficit for 2013 and the Independent Budget Office a $4.8 billion deficit.
The reason for the big difference is that the Independent Budget Office forecasts what it calls "moderate" economic growth in contrast to the mayor's budget office's forecast of a "slower and weaker recovery." As a result, the Independent Budget's Office's forecasts of tax revenues are $2.0 billion higher than the mayor's for 2013 and $2.9 billion higher for 2014.
The bailout and clever accounting alone do not account for the changed fiscal picture. Budget cuts also played a role.
The New York State Financial Control Board in its November staff report projected that the cuts to agencies from all the financial plans since January 2008 would total over $3.4 billion lost in 2011 alone. Those cuts, along with the unanticipated new revenues, have stabilized the city's fiscal condition for the near term -- and possibly for much longer -- but the impact of the cuts is not generally known. The Independent Budget Office report offers some clues.
The Department of Education, for instance, has lost a projected $546 million since June 2009's adopted budget, according to the Independent Budget Office. Of this, $261 million came out of classroom funding. If the mayor’s proposal to give teachers only a 2 percent raise -- versus an anticipated 4 percent -- does not fly, the city could lose an estimated 2,500 teacher positions. (State budget cuts could also create large reductions.) An unexpected increase of 14,000 students in the schools this year has further strained the education budget.
The news in education, though, is comparatively positive. Education spending increases by $1.1 billion, from $18.2 billion to $19.3 billion, over the next four years. (Budget "cuts" in practice often mean simply a reduction in the size of previously projected growth.) In almost all other agencies expenditures actually fall over the next four years.
Homeless services – where the number of families with children in shelters has increased by 21 percent in the first half of this fiscal year – is projected to be cut by $69 million over the next four years, an average of 2.3 percent each year. Children's services will be cut an average of 1.4 percent each year, health services by 1.0 percent each year. (This does not include mandated Medicaid costs, which will go up by over $1.5 billion over four years, or almost 6 percent a year.)
Senior and youth employment services are likely to see big cuts, primarily because of cuts in federal and state aid. The Independent Budget Office reports that the Department for the Aging sees a worst-case scenario of closing 100 senior centers, a third of the city's 301 centers. Youth employment this summer could drop by 35,000, or 67 percent.
Police (an average 0.8 percent cut per year) and fire departments (1.9 percent ) have similar cuts over four years, although the mayor has ruled out the layoffs of any police officers. Sanitation is the exception to the cutting, because of the cost of exporting waste to landfills outside of the city, which increases an average of 2.9 percent each year.
The mayor has two modest, reasonable tax increases in his preliminary budget: extending the mortgage recording tax to coop loans (technically not mortgages because they cover shares in a building) and extending the city sales tax to fuel sold to airlines. Together the two would raise an estimated $211 million in 2011.
There are no changes in the major taxes. But the mayor has hiked taxes to increase revenues in the past, and the Independent Budget Office traces the impact of earlier changes. For example, the city sales tax rate increase last year (from 4.0 to 4.5 percent) raises an estimated $468 million in 2010. The canceling of the 7 percent property tax rate cut (in effect in fiscal 2008 and half of fiscal 2009), added $1.3 billion to 2010’s property tax revenues.
It is interesting to note that the property tax rate cut (plus a homeowner rebate of $400) was in place at the same time that budget cuts in education and all other agencies -- totaling $3.4 billion in 2011 -- began. And the Independent Budget Office reminds us that the two thirds of city residents who are renters got no break. These same people, because on average they make less than homeowners, also were more burdened by the sales tax increase.
Along with its review of the numbers, the Independent Budget Office report also makes brief allusion to some management issues in the Department of Education. The law renewing mayoral control of schools in 2009 gave the office, along with the city comptroller, new powers to monitor the department's opaque financial systems.
The challenge facing the IBO in its new role is clear in its several-page analysis of the department's policies and practices. For example the IBO cites "another reorganization of how schools receive operational and administrative support through its central bureaucracy, the effects of which have not yet been fully accounted for in the operating budget." That sounds like the department at this late stage of the budget process either does not know what the effects of the change are or hasn't made them clear to the budget office, a key monitor.
The IBO seems to acknowledge its challenge in another example: "Another change that will affect DOE's overall budget next year is yet another reorganization of the department’s back office support for schools." The report goes on to explain (what the recent Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report ignores) the three re-organizations that have taken place.
Briefly, the 32 community school districts inherited by the Bloomberg administration were first collapsed into 10 regional centers. Then the centers were disbanded and transformed into Integrated Service Centers. Now the department has created Children First Networks, an outgrowth of an effort called the Empowerment Zone, which gave 500 schools more independence from the central office and evolved support networks within the zone.
All of this has budget implications. It will, for example include the elimination of 80 administrative positions, the disbanding of several support organizations, and closing of the Integrated Service Centers. But assessing those impacts will be difficult since the Independent Budget Office has little or no public information from the department about rationales or ultimate impacts or these changes.
As the mayor prepares to release the executive budget and continues negotiations with the City Council, the Independent Budget Office's analysis is a useful background paper for all those interested in a reasonable adopted budget. It suggests that economic and fiscal conditions are much more positive than the mayor has acknowledged.
It suggests, on one hand, that much of what the mayor has done to reach this point of fiscal stability is admirable. Raising the property tax rate 18.5 percent in 2003 after a decade of a frozen rate is probably the most important.
But much is also disturbing. The impact of service cuts, narrowly targeted tax cuts, and regressive tax increases have received far too little attention. The city's wealthiest households continue to pay at a lower personal income tax rate than they did in earlier recessions.
One reading of the report is that there is enough cushion in the current economy and fiscal condition to redress some of the recent inequities, to be more creative and certainly to be less punishing. Even if big cuts in state aid to the city -- ignored in the preliminary budget itself -- materialize, there is arguably enough good news in recent fiscal developments to minimize any further cuts in essential city services.
Glenn Pasanen, who teaches political science at Lehman College, has been in charge of Gotham Gazette's finance topic page since 2001.
You may have noticed some changes while driving out of the city Friday evening: major repairs once fully underway on that cracked and crumbling bridge have stopped. The previously omnipresent hardhats with orange vests were missing from major roadways.
Where did they go?
Late last month, in response to the budget crisis, Gov. David Paterson halted payments on state-funded construction projects already underway or soon to be started. Work deemed to be of an emergency nature or funded by federal stimulus funds will continue.
Paterson's move has forced contractors to evaluate whether they can continue their projects without payment from the state or will have to shut down and lay off hundreds of workers.On Friday, a number of trade associations filed a lawsuit in Albany Supreme Court in an attempt to force Paterson to pay up.
The contractor who is in charge of the repairs to the Alexander Hamilton Bridge, for example, told the New York Post on April 2 that he would have to begin shutting down the project if the state did not reestablish funding. The company did not return calls for comment on this story. Other major projects in the five boroughs that could be in jeopardy include bridge and roadwork on the Nassau Expressway in Queens and repairs to the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn.
The funding situation has created an immediate crisis, but New York's transportation infrastructure did not become decrepit overnight. (For a look at some of New York City's decaying streets, see Gotham Gazette's slide show, Rough Roads.) For years legislators and the governor have raided the fund set aside to repair State Department of Transportation owned roads and bridges. Now, with a $9 billion dollar deficit to deal with and an even darker financial picture looming in the near future, the state says it does not have enough money to fund the five-year road and bridge plan.
The budget is now more than two weeks late and the legislature has passed two bare-bones budget extenders to keep state government running. When the Senate went to vote on the second extender last week, upstate Republican Sen. John DeFrancisco tried to introduce an amendment that would have added emergency funding for construction projects.
Sen. Martin Dilan, the chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, told the chamber he agreed with the idea of the bill and had sent a letter to the governor's budget director requesting that funding for the transportation projects be made part of any future budget extenders. (To read Dilan's letter, go here.) But Dilan said he would not vote for DeFrancisco's amendment because the Assembly had already passed its extender without it.
"I understand Sen. Dilan's position," DeFrancisco told the Senate, "but I think there comes a point in time where we really truly ought to fight in the forum where we have some power, rather than hoping on the good will of the administration." Passing the amendent, he said, would send a message to the governor that "this is really important not just for public safety, but to keep people employed."
DeFrancisco feels that upstate is in particular being hung out to dry because the state has not come up with a long-term road and bridge plan. He said that the legislature has "bailed out the MTA" but has not provided more money to fix upstate transportation woes.
DeFrancisco's amendment was defeated. Republican Sen. Tom Libous sharply criticized the decision not to include construction projects. (For his written statement and a link to a video, go here.)
The defeat and the budget delay have put a number of projects in limbo. Some construction firms say they are obligated by their contracts to meet certain deadlines whether or not the state pays them. Some have already completed the work.
"I talked to a contractor in Syracuse who finished the work on a project, but he hasn't been paid," said DeFrancisco. He added the delay was "simply a tactic" by the governor "to get the assembly and senate to pass his budget."
Meanwhile, industry representatives say the delayed payments will cost New York State jobs as well as create headaches, if not outright danger, for motorists.
Felice Farber of the General Contractors Association of New York said the latest budget maneuvering is part of a continuing problem: New York's long-standing neglect of its infrastructure. "The real issue is, New York has an enormous infrastructure, roads and bridges that need real maintenance. Lots of these projects have taken a long time to plan," Farber said. "The longer it takes to get started, the longer it will take to complete the projects and the more will have to be spent on maintenance because they don't have the money to pay for rehabilitation."
In other words, you may not be imagining things if you think you notice more cracks in the pavement, falling debris, or jutting metal plates covering the road while driving the kids to Coney Island. It isn't a mirage when you see water through cracks in the bridge roadbed.
Recent studies show that New York's roads and bridges are falling into a state of disrepair and putting drivers in danger. State funds from gas, motor vehicle and highway taxes that are designated for road maintenance and rehabilitation have been raided over and over again to fill budget gaps. As a result, with each passing year roads and bridges overseen by the state become more worn and increasingly costly to repair. Rather than making the big expenditures needed to completely rehabilitate an ailing bridge, the state spends just enough money to keep the bridges and roads passable. Meanwhile cars and trucks jam old roads and bridges that were not designed for current levels of traffic, exacerbating traffic problems and leading to delays and accidents.
A January 2010 the study by TRIP, a national transportation research group, found that the state now spends considerably less on road maintenance than it once did. Half of the revenue received by the New York State Highway and Bridge Dedicated Trust Fund goes to pay off debt. Debt service is expected to take over 75 percent of the fund’s incoming revenues by 2013.
From fiscal years 1993-1994 to 2008-2009 a little over one third of expenditures from the New York State Highway Bridge Dedicated Trust Fund went toward improving roads and bridges. It is expected that by 2013 only 21 percent of expenditures from the trust fund will be spent on road and bridge maintenance. An analysis of New York's 20-year transportation needs show the state would require about $175 billion from 2010 to 2030 to maintain its transportation infrastructure. Revenue estimates show the state will likely be $87 billion short of that goal.
Another study, this one by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli released this past fall, found that only 35 percent of the funds from the Highway and Bridge Dedicated Trust Fund have been directed to improving infrastructure since the fund was created in 1991. The rest funded the state Department of Transportation and the Department of Motor Vehicles, and paid off debt. DiNapoli's office estimates that "$3.9 billion will need to be transferred from the state’s General Fund to the Highway and Bridge Trust Fund over the next five years to meet the Trust Fund's obligations."
"It was poor fiscal management that led to the projects' fund dwindling," said Graham Parker in Dilan's office. "It was raided to push budget gaps, and suddenly now it just caved in on itself."
And that is not good news for New Yorkers. The Department of Transportation is not in charge of all of New York's roads -- the city is responsible for typical city streets such as the one where Mayor Michael Bloomberg filled what he said was the 2 millionth pothole. The state does, though, oversee parts of major highways, expressways and bridges, such as Interstates 495, 87, 95 and 278.
Who is in charge of which roads is broken down by the terms "built" and "unbuilt." According to the state Department of Transportation website, "In NYC there are currently approximately 155 miles of built (state owned) arterials and 95 miles of unbuilt (city owned) arterials." The highway law states that the state will take over roads from the city as they are reconstructed to meet current standards. The state is slowly taking over responsibility for more portions of road around the five boroughs.
The delayed maintenance and canceled projects have taken their toll. According to the TRIP report, 22 percent of New York State's major roads, including highways, arterials and freeways, have been rated in poor condition. Twenty-four percent of them are in mediocre condition. Those conditions lead to damage to vehicles, increased fuel consumption and wear on tires. That translates into every motorist spending an extra $405 annually to operate a vehicle. In total, New York's motorists are paying $4.5 billion more each year due to poor road conditions, the report says.
More than 100 bridges across New York state, according to DiNapoli's audit, have been ranked as being less safe than the Crown Point bridge in upstate, which was demolished last year.
The General Contractors Association of New York released a top ten list last year (see box). Most of the bridges on the list are located in the Bronx.
The top offender, the 70-year-old Kosciuscko Bridge, which notoriously creates bottlenecks on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is scheduled to be replaced. New Yorkers spend hours on the bridge waiting in traffic jams, staring at potholes and other suspicious looking construction flaws. Some 170,000 vehicles traverse the span each day, and the accident rate on the bridge is four times greater than on other bridges around the state.
The state's inability to find funding for road projects has extended the time it will take to replace the bridge and increased the cost of the endeavor. "The cost of the Kosciuscko Bridge went from $750 million to a billion. And most of the project has been broken up into pieces," says Farber.
Talk about replacing the bridge began in 2002, and the project has been in various stages on and off since then. A number of different bridge designs have been proposed .
The transportation department says that replacing the bridge will begin in 2014. "That bridge has so much daily use, it's really up there in cost for a bridge like that not to be maintained," said Parker. "There needs to be money for maintenance so that projects don't get to this point. We need to get back to maintaining."
The Tappan Zee Bridge, a familiar span of concrete and steel for those who venture upstate across Interstate 87, creates fear among many who drive across it on a regular basis. The American Automobile Association deemed it one of the "Worst Bridges in New York" along with, you guessed it, the Kosciuscko Bridge. The Tappan Zee has been rated structurally deficient by numerous studies including a 2006 National Bridge Inventory by the National Highway Administration. One motorist told the Poughkeepsie Journal that she keeps a tool in her car to bash out her windows so that she can escape should the bridge collapse.
The Tappan Zee is riddled with cracks in columns and corrosion in its drainage system. The very material it was constructed with during the 1950s is substandard since better metals at the time were being appropriated for the Korean War effort. The structure is under perpetual repair and at the same time it bears 40 percent more traffic every day than it was designed to take. When it was first constructed the bridge carried around 18,000 vehicles a day; now traffic can exceed 170,000 vehicles a day.
Experts say the entire bridge needs to be replaced. The state is currently in the midst of replacing the bridge's deck and has spent millions of dollars to keep the bridge passable.
Last year, the Department of Transportation's proposed a $25.8 billion, five-year capital plan for road and bridge projects statewide. Parker said that the five-year capital projects plan contained a lot of major projects that would have helped prevent bridges from getting to the state of repair the Kosciuscko bridge is currently in.
In October, though, Paterson rejected the proposal, saying the state's finances would not allow the expenditure. Currently there is a two-year, $6.9 billion capital plan proposed. "There are no big projects in the two-year plan," said Farber. "There is lots of maintenance just to keep things standing, and the DOT knows they are going to suffer because of that."
Dilan has said the state's roads and bridges need at least $5 billion a year "to bring them up to acceptable standards." He is calling for, at minimum, at two-year $10 billion plan.
Paterson was looking to secure private investment for major projects like the rebuilding the Tappan Zee and Kosciuscko bridges through the Commission on State Asset Maximization. The commission was established by executive order in 2008 to study public-private partnerships. Commission members include former State Comptroller Carl McCall, Assemblyman Herman Farrell and Libous. Its executive director is Sam Barend.
According to a report by the New York Post the commission was set to establish a board that would have sought out private investment just as the scandals and legal trouble started building for Paterson. Sources told the Post that the political fallout damaged the commission's ability to move forward. Calls to Paterson's office and to Barend about the current state of private investment in infrastructure were not returned.
Regardless of how the work is funded, a growing number of legislators say more has to be done to keep New York's roads safe while simultaneously putting people to work. The state lost 33,400 construction jobs last year according to Farber. She expects next year to be much worse.
In a March 18 op-ed for The Capitol, Dilan wrote that investing in construction projects around the state will end up boosting the economy by providing jobs, as opposed to the current situation, in which construction workers are being forced onto the unemployment lines.
"Investment in and the maintenance of our transportation system puts people to work and helps to keep goods and people moving," wrote Dilan. "We must end old practices of under-funding our capital plans. We now can see firsthand the effect pilfering of our dedicated transportation funds has had on our state."
Dilan then referred to the Crown Point Bridge which traverses Lake Champlainon the Vermont border. Lat fall, New York and Vermont official determined the 80-year-old bridge was beyond repair. They closed the decrepit structure in October and blew it up a few days after Christmas.
With the bridge out, ferry service was increased but for some residents, that did not help. Commercial sections in the area became ghost towns. A large number of the 3,400 commuters who traveled the bridge must now drive an extra 100 miles to their jobs. Some residents speak of waking up in the wee hours of the morning to make the right ferry or to allow for the time to drive around the edge of the lake.
Most medical services are available on the Vermont side, and to some on the New York side, it feels like Crown Point was blown up along with the bridge. There is now squabbling over who and how the bridge will be replaced.
"Crown Point Bridge and the citizens who relied on it daily are not only the victims of careless money management," Dilan wrote." They are also victims of an antiquated policy when it comes to our roads and bridges: a policy of deferred maintenance and exorbitant replacement costs. It has opened our eyes to the fact that a better investment strategy is to 'fix it first.'"