Albany’s love affair with kitchen-sink budgets

When is a budget not really a budget? When it’s done in New York! This isn’t an April Fool’s day riddle or the opening line of a joke. New York state’s budget process has become a catch-all policy debating society among legislators and interest groups on just about any issue you can imagine.

If you ask your average New Yorker what should be included in the state budget, I suspect you’d hear responses mostly centered around taxes, spending, funding priorities and maybe increased state aid to municipalities. While all of those issues – which can be polarizing enough – are tackled in some way, shape or form in the mammoth $150 billion document that lawmakers were voting on in the wee hours of Friday morning, so much of the kabuki dance surrounding this year’s budget had to do with ethics reform, campaign finance reform, the minimum wage debate, paid family leave and a host of other issues.

Not long ago, if an interest group wanted something passed, they would simply lobby the state Legislature to pass it and try to get the governor to sign it. Ah, the good old days! Nowadays, unions, good-government groups, trade associations and lobbyists who come to Albany with their wish lists have come to realize that if their issue isn’t part of the budget agreement, the chances of it being acted upon reside somewhere between slim and none.

What does all this mean? I suppose it all depends on who you are. If you’re a governor that wants to use the power to raise lawmaker salaries as a bludgeoning instrument to force legislators to pass a budget, it’s a great thing. If you’re a lawmaker from a right-leaning district that wants political cover for raising the minimum wage, the budget provides a convenient excuse. Really, the budget process precludes voting for anything, and puts independent-minded legislators in a difficult spot – “I don’t agree with X bill but what was I going to do? Shut down state government?”

The danger is that this budget process has become an increasingly slippery slope. Don’t issues as vast and important as a minimum wage hike deserve a debate on their own merits? Shouldn’t the corruption convictions of two of the “three men in a room” be enough of an impetus for wide-reaching ethics reform without needing to use the budget as either the carrot or stick (depending on your perspective)?

There’s certainly an argument to be made for including broader policy areas in the state budget, since almost everything the state Legislature does affects state spending in some way. If that’s the case though, let’s send the state Legislature home as soon as the budget is passed and at least save the taxpayers the per diem expenses of keeping the session going until June. A smarter approach might be to mandate that all state legislation will not only provide a cost estimate for its implementation, but require the sponsors to detail how that program will be paid for either in terms of increased taxes or cuts to other programs. If we’re going to make every budget an omnibus policy document, let’s make all legislation budget bills.

While many editorial boards, legislators, fiscal watchdogs and good-government groups have talked about the cost of this budget and the very brief window of time to review its contents, it’s past time to explore how we got to the point where the budget is no longer strictly a spending plan, and what that means for how we debate important legislation.