Nothing to hit in a mirage
On Thursday afternoon when a smiling Gov. Kathy Hochul told us what we wanted to hear, that “we have a conceptual agreement” for a 2022-23 state budget, there was heaved a collective sigh of relief by watchers of the process.
But hold on, though. A “conceptual agreement” without the hard details of language and numbers is not much more than a mirage open to wide interpretation. It is certainly not a budget, not yet.
Not that this little game governors play to pretend they’ve passed a “timely” budget is anything new. But this is a very special year and the governor’s budget, mirage or more, looms as a critical political document at every stage from now to enactment. It’s critical to the governor’s political future.
She doesn’t have much of a record to run on. Hochul has only been in office since August. There’s her good work with the pandemic, but that was mostly reactive. Instead of the customary record to promote and defend, we have this conceptual document, a work in progress, from which we must project all manner of things. Of course, Hochul is happy to interpret it for us. It’s supposed to show us how well she can hold her own against a Legislature that is not as much in tune with the state’s disparate electorate as it once was. It does show positively her budget priorities, and that is certainly important for us to know and judge for ourselves. I think her inclinations are very good, actually.
But as for what this budget actually will be in terms of say, explicit changes aimed at reforming bail reform and how these changes will make us safer or not, or just how much and when judges can return to being judges, or exactly how much and in what ways we are rewarding the billionaire owners of the Buffalo Bills for a new stadium, that may take a while before we get the perspective we would like.
On the negative side, Hochul, whether fairly or not, has the appearance of being ethically challenged between a husband with a concessions stake in the Buffalo Bills, very much in the budget news, and a lieutenant governor with a host of ethical questions of his own to answer.
What is it about New York and corruption, or at least its perception? Hochul’s answer to ethical oversight, her own version of a joint commission on public integrity, is half-baked at best, and a major misstep if she doesn’t give it a rigid independent spine. This was not well thought through.
What I find impressive, though, is how well the general public can factor a lot of smoke and mirrors and come out with a plausible consensus on how it feels about the candidate in question. In the latest Siena Poll, when voters were asked if Hochul won the primary would they
vote for her in November or would they prefer someone else, they were split 43 percent to 43 percent. That’s after preferring her in the primary.
Which tells us that as Democratic a state as New York is, winning the primary June 28 is still only the prequel, even as unlikely as a Republican succeeding might be. She can take nothing for granted. It is a pleasing irony that the same day Hochul was announcing the “conceptual agreement” was also the deadline for filing for the Democratic primary — as in Andrew Cuomo. He didn’t. Now his options are down to running as an independent third party candidate or sitting it out. Ten percent of the voters in the Siena Poll said he should run as an independent. Not a robust endorsement.
So the best that can be said of the vague proposed agreement heading toward a budget is that the governor can wield it as a staff to beat off critics and primary foes, including the dark prince. There’s nothing to punch at in a mirage. And it can be spun to generally persuade the public that Hochul’s the one. At least for now.
Final thoughts on the two issues I raised – bail reform and the Buffalo Bills.
It is especially galling that we don’t have specifics initially as to what was agreed to with an extremely reluctant Legislature over bail reform, even if it changes. Each “may” and “shall” in the laws will matter a lot, and if dangerousness has not been sufficiently addressed in the new latitude supposedly given to judges, even back door, Hochul will pay a price.
Big taxpayer subsidies are the rule rather than the exception for every major professional sports stadium built in this country — even though a Brookings Institute report in 2016 found that there is practically no economic benefit locally or to the states where such stadiums are built.
But I consider it a quality of life issue. The Bills and Sabres are the only big league pro teams upstate. They deserve as much financial consideration from state and federal taxpayer subsidies as the downstate pro teams have already gotten, abundantly.
It doesn’t hurt either that lately the Bills are the only real contenders of the bunch.