Senate chief Flanagan spends $24G on a SECOND office shower

ALBANY — Shortly after assuming his powerful position in May 2015, state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan spent nearly $24,000 in taxpayer money to add a shower to his state Capitol office, the Daily News has learned.

Sources with direct knowledge of the project say the shower was added even though the Republican’s other office in the nearby legislative office building was already equipped with a shower.

The gym in the legislative office building that Flanagan frequently uses also has showers, lawmakers say.

“This is why New York’s Legislature is called the goldplated legislature,” said Blair Horner, of the New York Public Interest Research Group. “They'll spare no expense.” The Senate requested the walk-in shower project in July 2015, two months after Flanagan took office, the sources said.

The initial cost for the installation ballooned by several thousand dollars months later, when Flanagan’s office wanted to make sure the floor and the walls in the existing half-bathroom matched the new shower, the sources said.

Senate GOP spokesman Scott Reif said the renovation was to an existing bathroom that already had running water and other amenities, and was in need of improvements.

He defended the new shower, saying that during many legislative session days — especially during budget talks and the end of session flurry — Flanagan is typically in his Capitol office, not his legislative lair, “round the clock.”

The Senate GOP since 2011 has also routinely been underbudget, Reif said.

“You’re asking us to justify a single expenditure in an operating budget that totals more than $90 million,” he said.

“What’s next? Accusing the majority leader of using too many pens? This is the kind of no-good, ‘gotcha’ journalism that belongs at the bottom of the drain.”

But Horner said that while the cost of the project may be small relative to the state budget, “these are symbolic gestures” that the public notices.

“What New Yorkers would prefer to see is the top elected officials pinching pennies, not spending thousands (on themselves),” Horner said.

lll Upstate Rep. John Faso says he’s not surprised the downstate transit system is in crisis — he raised the looming problems when he ran for governor back in 2006.

Faso , a Republican from Columbia County, made fixing the MTA a key part of his downstate agenda during his unsuccessful race against Democrat Eliot Spitzer.

“I was talking about problems with the signal system and the need for upgrades and the need for the state to put more resources into the capital plan and for pension reforms,” Faso says

now. He also warned how a growing amount of MTA revenue was being used to pay the debt from prior capital plans, and argued more projects need to be funded in a pay-as-you-go manner. “It was predictable,” Faso said of the current problems. “It’s something I was warning about in 2006. But it’s hard to get people to pay attention to this stuff until a crisis happens — and now we’re there.”

Faso says the first step toward solving the transit problems is for the governor to stop pointing fingers at Mayor de Blasio and accept responsibility for control over the MTA. The congressman has previously warred with Cuomo with his support for Trumpcare and plan to shift more of New York’s Medicaid burden onto the state.

“This is a man who has enough time to spend on multicolored lights on bridges, but avoids and evades something he should truly be concerned with,” Faso said.

Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi shot back: “Talk is cheap and Faso didn’t lift a finger to stop the Pataki administration from starving the MTA when he was a leader in the Assembly.”