Robert Ward – Another report on America’s “failing schools”

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Almost 30 years ago now, a task force appointed by President Reagan concluded that failures in our education system were making the United States “a nation at risk.”  Since then, dozens of other reports have concluded essentially the same thing. Now, yet another report – this one from a Council on Foreign Relations task force – puts a slightly different perspective on the problem. read more

Robert Ward – Extraordinary change at the Capitol

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All kinds of things are happening at the state Capitol this week.  Pension reform.  Redistricting the state Legislature.  Paving the way to bring seven new casinos to the state.  And final negotiations on the coming year’s budget…just to name the biggest issues currently on the table.  Here are a few words about a few different things. read more

Robert Ward – Two warnings on city finances

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All around the world, economists and social observers are celebrating the importance of cities. In a bestselling book published last year, Edward Glaeser of Harvard calls the city the greatest invention ever, something that makes us richer, smarter, greener, healthier and happier. read more

Robert Ward – Governor Cuomo introduces his budget-plus

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The big news at the state Capitol this week is the proposed budget Governor Cuomo introduced for the New York State fiscal year that starts on April first. What’s most interesting about the Governor’s budget is how much of this plan is … not the budget.

A year ago, in his first budget after taking office, Governor Cuomo sent the Legislature an ambitious set of proposals to limit the growth of state spending. That plan called for significant cuts in state agency operations, education and health care. And it included, for the first time ever in New York, statutory limits on how much education and Medicaid expenditures could grow each year in the future.  The Legislature didn’t really want to do any of these things. But for the most part, the Senate and Assembly, Republicans and Democrats, went along. It was a very big change in New York’s political culture. 

Fast forward to the legislative session just begun.  Again, the governor has an ambitious set of numbers in his new budget. State-funded expenditures would be held to an increase of 1.6 percent, less than the rate of inflation. Many members of the Legislature will hear – from interest groups they consider important – that finding more dollars is imperative.

 But the real battles will not be fought over the numbers.  Rather, the controversy will be over items in the budget that are not the budget.

The most contentious will be Governor Cuomo’s proposal to provide a somewhat less generous pension plan to future state and local government employees. This would not affect people who are already employed by the state, local governments and school districts. The new plan would only be for people who are hired after it takes effect.  One potential downside is that we want to attract highly qualified people to be teachers, police officers, transportation engineers, and so on. But most public-sector positions already attract large numbers of well-qualified applicants, so that may not be an issue. The state and local government pension systems would still be significantly more generous than the retirement plans available to workers in the private sector – many of whom unfortunately have no employer-provided retirement plan at all.

 The governor also proposes creating a new retirement option for future state and local government workers. That would be a defined contribution plan, something like the 401k and 403b plans many private-sector and university employees have now.  It might make government jobs more attractive to young workers who don’t want to spend their entire careers with one employer.

The main rationale behind the governor’s pension reforms is to reduce taxpayer costs without cutting services.  He also has a series of proposals intended to give government managers more flexibility in hiring, promoting and reassigning their employees.  State agency managers have complained for years that they find it hard to provide real organizational leadership because the civil service rules are so complex and hidebound. Among other changes, the new budget includes a proposal to do without traditional civil service exams for a limited number of individuals with specialized skills in information technology, or other professional, scientific and technical areas. The concept of civil service is essential – the idea that career public servants must be hired based on their abilities rather than on loyalty to a political party or an influential friend. It’s a time-honored principle advanced more than a century ago by reform-minded New Yorkers including Teddy Roosevelt and Grover Cleveland. But most experts who have studied civil service going back several decades would agree that the rules have gone too far and often get in the way of effective government rather than promoting it.

These and other non-budget issues, such as teacher evaluation, are wrapped up in Governor Cuomo’s budget because doing so gives the chief executive a way to force lawmakers to consider big changes they might otherwise ignore. The governor has a popularity rating of more than 70 percent, according to the latest Siena poll.  And beyond the polls, he has a hard-to-describe ability – more than any governor since Rockefeller – to make legislators believe they need to work with him.

The new fiscal year starts about 10 weeks from now.  Many of Governor Cuomo’s non-budget,  budget proposals are unpopular with many of the most influential lobbying interests at the Capitol. As of now, though, the Legislature seems to want to be cooperative. For the second year in a row, this governor holds the commanding heights of the political debate in New York.

Robert B. Ward is Deputy Director/Director of Fiscal Studies at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.

Robert Ward – New York’s Outdated Constitution

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How many state senators is New York supposed to have?  Answer: We don’t know.

There is the dividing line between Governor Cuomo’s power, and the Legislature’s authority, over the state budget?  Again, the answer is: We don’t really know. 

How can these most basic questions about the way our state government operates be unanswerable?  Don’t we have a state Constitution that provides the basic framework for these kinds of things?

We certainly do.  Unfortunately, what we have in the New York Constitution is a foundational set of laws that last underwent broad reform in 1938, and in many ways are long outdated. 

Take the current controversy over redistricting of the Legislature to reflect changes in the state’s population.  Drawing the lines of the districts where members of the Legislature will seek re-election is the most important political issue awaiting action this year.  It will have a big impact on politics and policy for the next 10 years.  Where to put those lines and how to shape the legislative districts is always expected to be controversial and difficult.  But in recent days, a separate controversy has entered the debate: Should the state Senate have 62 members or 63?

 After the 2000 Census, the Republicans who controlled the Senate pushed through a resolution expanding the number of Senate seats from 61 to 62. The Republicans knew they would have a good chance of drawing district lines so that they would win the election in the additional district. That move indeed helped Republicans keep control of the Senate for almost all of the following decade, despite voter enrollment in New York that very much favors the Democrats. 

Now, the Republicans are proposing another additional seat in the Senate, taking the number from 62 to 63.  Again, they will be in a position to draw the district lines and maximize the possibility that they can keep control of the Senate going forward.

This kind of thing is what political parties do at redistricting time. The Democrats who are in charge of the state Assembly will also draw their lines in ways that tend to favor their members. Many observers have said for years that New York ought to change the Constitution to provide independent oversight of the redistricting process. That’s a discussion for another day. 

But you would think that we should at least have clear Constitutional rules on how many seats there are in the Legislature before the redistricting process begins. Such rules would reduce the opportunity for one party or the other to benefit unfairly from the redistricting process.  But no, not in the case of the New York Senate.  Since 1894, the number of Senate seats has been based on rules that take into account the size of the state’s population and the distribution of that population among the state’s counties. Those rules are further complicated by federal and state court decisions that were handed down in the 1960s. The result of all of this is a set of arcane arguments such as whether the populations of Staten Island and Suffolk County should be considered together or separately in the calculation of Senate seats.  In short, it’s a mess.�
The purpose of laws, and especially of a constitution, is to make the fundamental rules clear. New York’s Constitution fails that test in a number of areas.

 Besides redistricting, another such area is the division of budgetary power between the governor and the Legislature. In 2005, the state Court of Appeals ruled that the Constitution gave Governor Pataki the power to write substantive policy law into the appropriation bills that the chief executive sends to the Legislature. Under the Constitution, the Legislature has no authority to change those policy proposals.  The Court of Appeals recognized that the Legislature is the lawmaking branch of state government, and so there must be some limits on the governor’s power to use budget bills this way.  But the court decision provided no guidance on what those limits should be.  Today, neither Governor Cuomo, nor members of the Legislature, nor anyone else can tell you exactly where the dividing line is between the governor’s powers and those of the Legislature.

So New York’s Constitution is badly in need of updating and reform.  What, if anything, will the state’s elected leaders do about that, during this year’s legislative session?   We will soon find out. 

Robert B. Ward is Deputy Director/Director of Fiscal Studies at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.
 

Robert Ward – The Next Generation of Open Government

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“There’s an app for that.”

How many times have you heard that line?  If you have a smart phone or a computer, there’s almost no limit to the software applications you can get for it.  An app called Shazam will identify a song you play or hum. Dropbox allows you to share photos, videos and other files easily. Let’s not even get started on Google translate, Google scholar and the rest of that universe.

But there’s at least one area of human endeavor where it’s still pretty hard to find an app.  If you want to know more about or interact with your federal, state or local government, the chances are there’s no app for that. read more