Robbing the poor to pay N.Y.
Here’s one way of balancing government budgets:
First, collect a bunch of money in the name of a good cause.
Next, don’t spend all the money.
Finally, raid the fund, since, after all, the money isn’t being spent.
That’s essentially what Gov. Kathy Hochul is looking to do with a pool of money created by the state 40 years ago to help people afford legal representation in civil cases. It’s exactly the wrong direction for the state to be going when it comes to fulfilling the goal of equal justice under the law regardless of how rich or poor one is.
As the Times Union’s Raga Justin reports, the governor proposes to sweep $100 million from the Interest on Lawyer Accounts, a trust fund created in 1983. IOLA draws its revenue from interest on accounts that lawyers set up when they hold money for clients for future use in legal matters.
A board of trustees distributes the money to legal providers around the state.
But the Hochul administration says the fund has a substantial surplus. It offers various arguments to justify the raid: that the state has provided more than $700 million for criminal and civil legal aid for low-income people; that New York had put more into the account over the past seven years than it wants to take out; and that the money would go to other important purposes.
All of that is unpersuasive. What the state chooses to do beyond what IOLA covers is all well and good, but that doesn’t give it a pass to raid the fund.
It’s true the fund has had trouble spending all the money it has — but there’s a reason for that: Civil legal providers are having trouble finding enough lawyers to take on cases in a backlogged court system. That leaves lowerincome people often heading for court without a lawyer to try to stop an eviction or fight a Family Court matter.
Ms. Hochul is hardly the first governor to sweep a fund designated for a specific purpose in order to help balance the books. The state pulled this under Govs. Andrew Cuomo, David Paterson, Eliot Spitzer and George Pataki, raiding, at various times, the Environmental Protection Fund, the Dedicated Highway and Bridge Trust Fund, and other accounts set aside for such things as promoting New York’s wine industry, maintaining snowmobile trails, neutering pets or improving rural 911 cellphone service. The state has also taken in billions in settlement funds from tobacco companies but has spent only a fraction of that money on smoking prevention and cessation.
And far from drawing down IOLA, the state should be expanding legal representation for the poor. We and others have long supported the initiative pushed by former Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman to provide assigned counsel to low-income defendants in civil cases, similar to the way counsel is assigned in criminal matters.
And beyond that need, this habit of sweeping funds so-called dedicated funds leaves the public dubious that the state is using money — whether it comes from interest on lawyer accounts, motor vehicle fees, gasoline taxes or surcharges on insurance and utility bills — as promised. Little wonder that, as a state comptroller’s report recently noted, the number of New Yorkers donating to charitable causes through tax return check-offs has declined over the years — while a significant amount of the money raised by those donations has gone unspent.
It’s moves like this — effectively balancing a budget on the backs of the poor — that can turn an already-skeptical public downright cynical.