Where the buck stops

With windfalls still at his back, Gov. Cuomo last week delivered a state budget proposal both fiscally prudent and properly ambitious for a state still far from its fullest potential. If only the cantankerous Legislature, in cold war with the governor over ethics reform and a pay raise, could be counted on to show the same common sense, at a time of shrinking state revenues and who-knows-what-comes-next from President Trump and a Republican Congress.

Counting on federal funds for one in three dollars New York spends (ulp), Cuomo’s $153 billion budget plan projects reaping $3 billion from a special tax on the highest earners that happens to expire at the end of 2017 — making up for a troubling decline in revenue collected overall.

The governor also makes good use of a fresh $1.4 billion reaped from state legal settlements with banks that behaved badly, using the funds to boost vital investments that include life sciences centers and counter-terrorism efforts.

On the margins, Cuomo makes strides toward smart savings, such as requiring retired state employees to contribute more to their health insurance premiums.

As a result, there’s room for sizable investments, the biggest of which is Cuomo’s $163 million plan to zero out the cost of public college tuition for most New York families.

Proving that no good deed in New York goes unprotested, a welcome billion-dollar boost in K-12 public school spending, and a needed update to spending formulas, has met with condemnation from some education advocates because Cuomo abandoned predecessors’ unfulfilled promises to spend still more.

What matters in the here and now: School spending will always be subject to the bloody fray of the legislative battlefield — and Cuomo has committed to both increase funding and better match aid to each district’s need.

If only the state’s fiscal restraint gave New York City a better shot at exercising the same muscle.

Nope. Even as Cuomo extols a one-stop contract process known as design-build as saving billions of dollars on big construction projects like the Tappan Zee Bridge, a good plan to roll out design-build statewide excludes the city, where the contractors’ lobby holds sway.

Likewise: Making good on fixing the 421-a rental apartment development tax break he broke in a misbegotten gift to construction unions, Cuomo reinvents it as the Affordable New York Housing Program and properly excludes luxury condominiums from the benefit.

But outer-borough lawmakers lay poised to force condos in — adding potentially billions more to the already spiraling cost to the city of the effort.

Neither city nor state can afford such ill-advised extravagances.