ALBANY – A key Republican lawmaker disclosed several “smoking gun” e-mails yesterday showing Gov. Spitzer‘s administration had OK’d funding for a local health-care clinic last month – before suddenly canceling the grant on Monday after his attack on Spitzer’s plan to give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.
Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco (R-Schenectady) revealed the records to back up his charge that Spitzer cut over $300,000 of his community projects to punish him for opposing the governor’s licensing plan and not – as Spitzer contended yesterday – to help get state spending under control.
“That’s an outright lie,” Tedisco’s chief of staff, William Sherman, said of Spitzer’s claim, calling the e-mails “the smoking-gun evidence.”
Disclosure of the e-mails came as The Post learned that Spitzer was holding up over $100,000 in local “member item” district projects for nearly 20 other Assembly Republicans. The move against Tedisco’s district was reported in The Post yesterday.
One e-mail appeared to directly contradict claims of Spitzer and his budget director, Paul Francis, that Tedisco was told in January that the funding would no longer be available.
Spitzer’s office e-mailed Tedisco’s on Sept. 6, saying: “We’re prepared to process this project along with the other items.”
Tedisco released the e-mails shortly after Francis made public a letter to Tedisco stating that Assembly Republicans were notified after Spitzer took office that “it was never our intention to provide member item funding for new projects after Jan. 1, 2007, outside the budget process.”
However, an aide to Spitzer conceded there was not written proof that such a notification was sent.
Additional reporting by Maggie Haberman