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With less than two weeks to go be fore a budget is due, aides to Gov. Cuomo fear a state shutdown could occur because of large spending demands by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, The Post has learned.
Administration insiders said they’ve been stunned to find that Silver (D-Manhattan), despite a $10 billion projected deficit, is “more concerned with satisfying the spending demands of this or that bloc in his conference than he is in doing what’s best for the state.”
“What has struck many people, and they find it hard to believe, is that for Shelly, it’s not about good government. It’s not about conceptualizing a vision for a better New York. It’s not about helping upstate. It’s not about making New York competitive with other states.
“It’s all about his tribal politics, satisfying this or that group in his conference that keeps him in power — and nothing more,” said an administration source.
“Shelly’s vision doesn’t extend beyond his conference and the people who give him the money to keep his conference in power.”
Silver responded by calling the allegations “not worth responding to,” but insisted he wasn’t making costly demands on the governor.
“I think we in the Assembly and the governor are moving pretty close together, dragging the Senate with us,” Silver told The Post. “I’m predicting that the Assembly will be in line with the governor for an on-time budget, and I’m hopeful the Senate will go along with us.”
Silver is seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in additional spending in Cuomo’s austere $133 billion budget, paid for in part by a dead-on-arrival “millionaires tax” the governor and the GOP-controlled Senate oppose.
Cuomo has warned that if a budget isn’t passed by April 1, he’ll force lawmakers to choose between a one-week budget “extender” that will include most of his fiscal plan or shutting the state down.
“High noon arrives soon, and it could mean a shutdown,” was how one Cuomo aide put it.
Cuomo, who enjoys sky-high popularity, has privately offered an olive branch to the widely reviled lawmakers by pledging to help them improve their image if their budget demands are reasonable.
“The legislators are despised by the public, and they’ve brought it on themselves,” noted an administration insider. “The governor is prepared to help them with that, but he wants to see them rehabilitate themselves by reining in spending and taxes, by passing an ethics law, by seriously addressing our economic problems.”
Meanwhile, administration insiders said Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau), while seeking additional spending for upstate and suburban school districts, was acting far more responsibly than Silver.
“Basically, Dean recognizes the state’s problems and just wants to make sure that the Senate isn’t shortchanged when it comes to any additional money that Silver gets,” said a source.
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Pity Queens Sen. Michael Gianaris.
Gianaris last year gave up an influential role in the Assembly’s Democratic majority to run for the Senate, expecting he’d quickly rise to influence in the talent-challenged leadership that was then running the Legislature’s upper house.
But Democrats lost control of the Senate last November and, arguably, in recent weeks they’ve lost control of themselves.
First, four Senate Democrats, including Jeff Klein of The Bronx and Diane Savino of Staten Island, defected to what they call an “independent” conference, which just happens to be closely allied with the GOP.
Then, earlier this month, Carl Kruger of Brooklyn was indicted for bribery, putting an instant freeze on his $2 million campaign war chest, which Gianaris had hoped to tap to pay off nearly $3 million in Senate Democratic debts.
“Permit me a bit of schadenfreude, but a few weeks ago, Mike was boasting that the Democrats’ time in the minority would be short-lived, and then four Democrats defected and one of his biggest contributors got arrested for bribery and corruption,” was how one senior Senate Republican put it.