This week Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch unveiled a budget plan designed to navigate New York state through its fiscal crisis.<\/p>\n
Here’s the takeaway: <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
If nothing else, his proposal offers another clear, unambiguous warning.<\/p>\n
We’ve already seen two years of steady trims and snips. <\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
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…)<\/p>\n
Yet even after all that belt-tightening, we’re nowhere close to break-even.<\/p>\n
The good news is that we’re fairly warned. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Here’s what worries me.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
I’m not sure that those folks have heard the warning, or taken to heart what it means.<\/p>\n
So let me say it again very clearly: The current budget deficit predictions for New York state top $9 billion dollars.<\/p>\n
Buried within that number is serious pain for all of us.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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