Metro

Cuomo proposes $136.5B state budget

ALBANY – Gov. Cuomo today proposed a $136.5 billion state budget that jump-starts Superstorm Sandy recovery efforts, takes baby steps toward school reforms and lets localities stretch out big, looming pension obligations.

The plan, in which Cuomo included a $1.50-an-hour hike in New York’s minimum wage to $8.75, increases state-funded spending by 1.6 percent.

Though Cuomo pledged no tax or fee increases, the proposal extends some existing levies that were due to expire.

They include taxes on Medicaid providers and utilities, the MTA business tax surcharge, a limit on charitable deductions for taxpayers with incomes over $10 million and a tax on waste tires – which Cuomo would make permanent to help fund environmental regulation.

His plan would also allow counties to renew their existing sales tax authority without action by state lawmakers.

“It’s not quite true that there’s no tax increase,” said fiscal watchdog E.J. McMahon, senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute.

He also criticized Cuomo’s plan to allow localities to spend less on their pension obligations now and more later to offset the delayed benefit of last year’s law curbing benefits for new public employees – who won’t retire for years.

“The pension thing is a gimmick,” McMahon said.

Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos of Long Island called Democrat Cuomo’s plan “a good blueprint.”

But Skelos said he wants to make sure school aid – which Cuomo proposed weighting towards mostly urban high-needs districts – “is done in a fair way.”

Skelos’s governing partner in the Senate, Independent Democratic Conference leader Jeff Klein of The Bronx, said including the minimum wage increase in the budget could make it easier to get through the legislature.

And Skelos said Cuomo’s decision to omit from the proposal annual indexing for inflation “certainly makes it a lot easier to support” – though Skelos stopped short of endorsing the plan and the state’s small business lobby criticized it.

Cuomo claimed a series of proposed workers compensation insurance reforms, including cuts in assessments and streamlining of the system, would save employers $900 million.

The plan for the fiscal year that starts April 1 defers scheduled 1.4 percent cost-of-living raises and inflation escalators for health and human services workers and freezes spending on state agencies while merging several.

And he said improvements at the Department of Motor Vehicles will cut office wait times to 30 minutes tops by early next year, move more transactions on-line and offer Saturday hours in certain DMV offices.

Though the city blew its chance for a $450 million, four percent school aid increase by failing to meet a deadline on a teacher evaluation plan, Cuomo would give the city the power to competitively negotiate rates with preschool special education providers.

He also included relatively small sums for competitive grants to fund start-up programs allowing selective full-day pre-kindergarten in high needs districts ($25 million), longer school days or years ($20 million), full-service “community schools” ($15 million), four-year, $15,000-a-year good teacher bonuses ($11 million), and a “bar exam” for teacher certification.

Assuming the feds deliver on about $30 billion in aid to help New York recover from superstorm Sandy, Cuomo proposed $21 billion for a variety of initiatives.

The state would require rebuilding to “modern building standards” and a voluntary home buyout alternative in areas where homeowners can’t or don’t want to rebuild.

Cuomo would also pump money into transportation, fuel supply, water supply, wastewater treatment systems, and electric distribution and flood protection system improvements, including vent covers, “tunnel bladders” and pumping capacity to protect the subways.

He would restore damaged beaches, dunes, and berms, and build new wetlands, reefs, dunes, and berms to reduce the impact of future wave action, storm surges and a rising sea level.

He would make hospitals, nursing homes and clinics more resilient to future storms and provide financial assistance to businesses, local governments and others affected by the storm.

He proposed improving information systems, specially training National Guard members and pre-positioning generators and other equipment for future storms.

He proposed allowing regulators to levy bigger fines on poor-performing utilities and even yank their operating certificates. He pledged to pursue privatizing the much-maligned Long Island Power Authority.

The budget plan Cuomo submitted to state legislators also boosts MTA operating aid by $358 million, or 11 percent, to $4.2 billion.

He said he’d use “innovative financing mechanisms” to leverage private dollars to help fund a $1 billion “green bank,” a program to spur renewable energy use.

He would beef up the state’s environmental protection fund by $19 million, to $153 million, through $15 million from unclaimed bottle deposit receipts and $4 million from increased and improved enforcement of the unclaimed deposit program.

He pledged $10 million to pay for community services for mentally ill New Yorkers discharged from psychiatric hospitals.

And he proposed $36 million to enforce the new gun legislation that toughens gun control and penalties for illegal gun use.

Cuomo also recommended closing two more prisons, the women’s Bayview prison in Manhattan – which has been vacant since it was evacuated last fall before Sandy hit – and upstate Beacon, while shuttering four upstate juvenile facilities.