GOV. PATERSON, nervously eye ing disastrous revenue figures from Massachusetts amid the Wall Street meltdown, will decide by Friday if he’ll call a special budget-cutting session of the Legislature next month.
Bay State tax receipts plummeted by $200 million during the first two weeks of September – before the full impact of last week’s Wall Street crisis was even felt – leading Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to consider asking his state’s Legislature to authorize emergency spending cuts.
“We’re watching Massachusetts, and if what is happening there is happening here, Governor Paterson will bring the Legislature back to Albany again,” a source familiar with the governor’s thinking told The Post.
Such an extraordinary budget-cutting session, coming just days before the November election, would enrage state lawmakers who, in many cases, are taking credit in their campaigns for increasing the very programs Paterson would be asking them to cut.
Paterson’s top budget aides expect to have updated revenue figures by Thursday, when the results of Sept. 15 quarterly tax filings become known.
Paterson will then decide whether to recall the Legislature, which, at his request, grudgingly returned to the Capitol last month to cut current-year state spending by $400 million.
“It’s a grim situation,” was how one Paterson aide put it.
A footnote: The Wall Street crisis has led Paterson administration officials to temporarily put off a long-awaited decision on choosing one of three potential builder-operators of the Aqueduct racetrack’s massive entertainment and casino complex.
The officials want to take a second look at the financing behind each of the three would-be operators to make sure it’s still solid.