Analysis: Paterson says he’ll square off with unions

By MICHAEL GORMLEY |Associated Press Writer

May 17, 2008

 

ALBANY, N.Y. – New York Gov. David Paterson is taking on the fight of his political life.

He’s promising to stand up to public worker unions in Albany, where their hundreds of thousands of votes and millions of dollars donated to campaigns and spent on lobbyists have given them unmatched power.

The question now is not just whether Paterson is up to the challenge, but whether it’s too late.

“It can’t be business as usual,” Paterson said Thursday in casting doubt on unions’ effort to boost benefits through the Legislature. “This is not the time to sweeten the pot because we’re about to lose the whole pot.”

It was a reference to what Paterson calls “the terrible truth” of New York’s fiscal health. That includes locked-in benefits and other spending in state budgets over the last several years that prompt his projection of $21 billion in budget gaps over the next three years.

Even in a cynical place like Albany, where governors for years have made other dire predictions only to embrace bloated budgets as good compromises, Paterson is raising expectations.

On Thursday, Paterson appeared to side with fiscally tight New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who is opposing a union lobbying effort to provide a second chance for employees to buy into a lucrative early retirement plan. Bloomberg says it would cost the city $200 million, an estimate disputed by lawmakers and union leaders.

Now, Paterson is facing his own tests.

The Democrat is starting to see the annual string of pro-labor measures to improve pension and other benefits for unionized public workers and retirees. Those efforts have passed with overwhelming or unanimous support in the Legislature, only to be vetoed by former governors George Pataki and Eliot Spitzer.

But Paterson, in office just three months after 20 years in the Senate’s Democratic minority where he benefited from the bales of campaign contributions spread about by unions, lacks the public mandate of those who were elected to the office. And he lacks Bloomberg’s billions that would help him fight off the kind of nasty union TV ad campaign that hurt Spitzer early in his brief time in office.

Paterson, who rose from lieutenant governor when Spitzer resigned March 17 over a prostitution investigation, has also sought to rebuild bridges between the executive and legislative branches. That, however, can be seen as a sign of weakness in the Capitol’s brand of power politics.

So far, his record is mixed.

Despite forecasting a falling sky in March, he eventually supported an even greater increase in the record amount of school aid. He also allowed the teachers’ unions to attach a measure that will make it easier to get tenure, although in a slightly weakened form. The measure prohibits school districts from using student performance on standardized tests as a measure of whether a teacher should get tenure, which provides almost lifelong job security.

But more recently, Paterson angered the United University Professions union, part of the powerful New York State United Teachers union, by giving the State University of New York about $140 million less of an increase than was sought.

University workers rallied outside the Capitol chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, SUNY cuts have got to go.” They said the cut put SUNY on the road to being “dismantled.”

But as with most lobbyists and activists in Albany, the demonstrators had a better sense of outrage than math.

Paterson didn’t “cut” SUNY funding, which will still increase by $20 million to $4.53 billion. That doesn’t include the $3.75 billion more in capital funding and another $6 billion in capital cash committed for coming years. And Paterson plans more as he commits to fulfilling Spitzer’s promise to bring SUNY to the national fore in higher education.

The “cut” to which the unions referred was the 3.5 percent spending reduction Paterson is requiring of all agencies as revenues decline. He said the 2009-10 budget must result in a true cut of 5 percent to 10 percent.

Paterson has another test headed his way.

The Legislature will soon send to his desk a bill that would prohibit state and local governments from trying to change generous health benefits provided to retirees. That would take the costly item off the table in collective bargaining for at least a year while a panel considers the future of health care for retirees. That panel, created by the Legislature, is heavily represented by labor, whose members could eventually collect the benefit. There are no seats on the panel for representatives of local government.

So the accidental governor’s trial by fire will get hotter in June, because these measures are often slipped into the final, late hours of the legislative session when few are watching.

Paterson so far hasn’t let up on legislators, who would rather not be known as the people who have been raising your taxes, in one form or another, for years.

That’s the cycle Paterson said he must end, this “trying to cut the same the same piece out of the pie.

“They don’t understand,” he said, “that there is no pie.”

Tags: new york, ny, paterson, politics, union, unions

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