When freshly inaugurated Gov. Andrew Cuomo gave his State of the State Address last year, he called for immediate “radical reform” and a “fundamental realignment” of state government.
Now he’s on the eve of his second such speech, set for tomorrow, and Cuomo fairly can say that he’s already set the state well on its way toward fundamental reform.
Yet much heavy lifting remains.
Unquestionably, the governor’s first year marked a dramatic shift from the gridlock and dysfunction of his predecessors — the ludicrous Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson and the too-often-somnolent George Pataki.
And it proved beyond doubt that Cuomo possesses the skills to make a difference.
People noticed.
A recent Siena Research Institute put his favorability rating at a whopping 71 percent. In a Quinnipiac University poll last month, voters gave him a lopsided 68 percent to 17 percent thumbs-up rating.
At the top of the list of Cuomo’s triumphs: a respectable state budget.
Not only did Cuomo get New York’s notoriously quibbling and incorrigibly dishonest lawmakers to pass a $132 billion tax-and-spend plan by the April 1 deadline, but in so doing he also closed a $10 billion spending shortfall. With. No. Tax. Hikes.
Impressive.
How’d he do it? Cuomo knew that the gap wasn’t real but merely an artifact of Albany’s budgeting practices: Spending increases are presumed, then presented as “deficits” that must be erased.
Cuomo would have none of it. He essentially froze outlays at more or less current levels — and the “deficits” disappeared.
No tax hikes needed.
It was a new concept — and, to be sure, no easy political feat. Cuomo deserves considerable credit for pulling it off.
The deal, notably, called for trims in state agencies and for tens of thousands of public-sector employees to go without raises.
Cuomo had to get members of the state’s two biggest unions, the Civil Service Employees Association and the Public Employees Federation, to see that pay hikes for them, while other folks got pink slips and state tax revenue slipped, were — to be blunt — obscene.
Cuomo threatened layoffs if they resisted, and, in the end, they blinked — accepting contracts with zero-percent hikes.
On top of all that, the newbie gov made good on a key campaign pledge: to cap New York’s outrageous property taxes, which have socked residents for years.
Lawmakers passed a number of changes Cuomo sought to laws governing pols’ ethical conduct.
And if all that isn’t enough, the gov’s Department of Environmental Conservation made one of the most economically promising recommendations to come out of Albany in years: Lift the ban on fracking.
Neighboring Pennsylvania is already reaping rewards (newfound business, jobs and tax revenue) by allowing the process — a method of extracting gas and oil from underground rock formations.
On the downside, Cuomo (as this page’s readers know well) broke a key campaign vow when he agreed to a tax hike on millionaires.
“New York has no future as the tax capital of the nation,” Cuomo said in last year’s address. “Our young people will not stay. Businesses will not come . . .The people of this state simply cannot afford to pay more taxes. Period.”
And yet, as his first year drew to a close, Cuomo did a 180 — walloping higher-income taxpayers with hikes of as much as 30 percent.
That was a mistake.
Still, the pluses of his first year are considerable — and prove that Cuomo retains remarkable potential to shift the state’s economic and political trajectory.
Now it’s on to Year 2.
Cuomo’s got his work cut out for him.
Start with his property-tax cap: A historic accomplishment, for sure, it lacked the needed relief from onerous state mandates — regarding public-employee pension benefits and Medicaid, for example — that make tax hikes necessary in the first place.
Forced to comply with expensive state rules, towns have had to circumvent the tax cap — rendering it, in effect, pointless.
If Albany fails to do something about mandates this year — for example, by passing serious pension reform that lawmakers can’t easily reverse later — the entire tax-cap exercise will have been for naught.
Cuomo also needs to put the DEC’s fracking suggestions into place and see that gas-drilling companies get permits — quickly.
Before enviro-zealots kill the idea altogether. (Already, towns have been spooked into passing their own anti-fracking laws.)
Cuomo can also have a powerful impact on the schools — by seeing that teacher evaluations, based on student performance, are rigorous.
And by backing local efforts, such as those pushed by Mayor Bloomberg, to oust lousy teachers and shut failing schools.
Andrew Cuomo has earned much political capital in his first year in office; the polls speak directly to that.
Now he must spend some of it — on mandates, school reform and a host of other items that the special interests love, but that the state can’t afford.
He was Rookie of the Year in 2011.
He must beware the Sophomore Jinx.