Ravitch’s budget is another warning

This week Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch unveiled a budget plan designed to navigate New York state through its fiscal crisis.

Here’s the takeaway:

Even with some modest tax increases and seriously painful spending cuts, the state will need to borrow about $2 billion a year to pay its bills.

If nothing else, his proposal offers another clear, unambiguous warning.

We’ve already seen two years of steady trims and snips.

The legislature is again confronting Governor David Paterson’s plan for much bigger cuts, including the closure of three North Country prisons, two Adirondack VICs, more than a dozen of our parks and historic sites…

Schools threatened with major cuts to state aid are already preparing to lay off staff, or cut jobs through attrition. (Saranac Lake’s district just announced that 15 positions will go…)

Yet even after all that belt-tightening, we’re nowhere close to break-even.

The good news is that we’re fairly warned.

Local governments, school districts, public sector employees, non-profits that rely on state grants, hospitals, nursing homes…we all have a responsibility to get ourselves ready for a new, leaner status quo.

Here’s what worries me.

I still hear regularly from activists, non-profit leaders, local officials, and union members making the usual pilgrimage to Albany demanding that their programs, their grants, and their pay-raises be reinstated (or even expanded).

I’m not sure that those folks have heard the warning, or taken to heart what it means.

So let me say it again very clearly: The current budget deficit predictions for New York state top $9 billion dollars.

Buried within that number is serious pain for all of us.

For the foreseeable future, every responsible decision — every school budget vote, every public employee contract negotiation, every public works project, every new program — has to be made in this context.