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ALBANY — Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo laid out plans yesterday for all-out war with the public-employee unions next year, as the current governor proposed ending the costly practice of allowing state workers to idle in empty buildings.
The state has wasted more than $17 million this year to keep open at least two unused facilities — the Tryon Boys Residential Center in Johnstown and the Annsville Residential Center outside Rome.
The Tryon facility still has 20 employees working in an empty building with no youths. Annsville’s workers have been reassigned.
The Office of Children and Family Services has struggled to close juvenile-detention centers even as more residents get diverted to in-home treatment programs and the population plummets.
The call to action by Gov. Paterson came a day after Cuomo blasted as “ridiculous” a union-backed law that requires the state to give 12 months’ notice before closing youth-detention facilities.
“It’s a very simple graphic demonstration of the dysfunction, of the incompetence, of the lack of connection to what really has to be done in this state,” Cuomo told Albany’s WGDJ 1300-AM.
Paterson listed lifting the 16-year-old requirement among several priorities for a special legislative session next Monday, including closing an estimated $315 million gap in this year’s budget.
Meanwhile, Cuomo said he was prepared to spend $4 million battling public-employee unions next year if they trash his budget-cutting plans.
Cuomo said he was ready to drain his campaign war chest and call on private-sector groups to pitch in more money should powerful labor forces target his attempts to close a projected $9 billion budget gap in damaging ad campaigns.
“They will attack me,” Cuomo said. “I anticipate it and I am prepared for it. If the Legislature wants to choose the special interests, I want to make it clear to the people of the state of New York exactly what the choices were.”
The unusually blunt warning came less than 24 hours after the Civil Service Employees Association released a radio ad that — in an apparent shot at Cuomo’s call to shrink government — blasted “politicians who talk about creating jobs while promoting layoffs.”