Late again in Albany

It’s April Fools’ Day and the joke’s on all of us because even though the New York State government’s fiscal year started a few hours ago at midnight, the Democratic Legislature and Gov. Hochul punted last Thursday, pushing the deadline up by a week to see if they can strike a spending deal by April 4.

They should do more than temporarily stretch the fiscal year by a few days. They should return the fiscal year back to July 1, the date used by 46 other states (and New York City) and the very same date that New York State used to have until the Republican Legislature changed it in 1943 at the behest of GOP Gov. Tom Dewey for some long-forgotten reason during World War II.

We can’t ask Dewey about this since he’s been dead for more than half a century, but in 1943 the Legislature wrapped all up its work and adjourned on March 26.

Of the three other states, Texas has a Sept. 1 fiscal year, while Alabama and Michigan begin their fiscal year on the same date as the feds, Oct.1. Only New York is this early — too early — making for a very compressed calendar, with “too short a budget review timetable,” one longtime expert tells us. It’s even before personal income taxes are due on April 15.

But while the law should be changed, until it is, the 213 legislators and the governor must follow the existing law.

Last year, the state budget was a month late. The explanation for missing the statutory date this year was that Easter was yesterday, making it too hard to reach agreement before the holiday weekend started on Good Friday. That’s no excuse. They just should have gotten their work done last week.

There was no surprise here. We’ve known the date of Easter 2024 since the British Parliament adopted the current Gregorian calendar (including for colonies like New York) in 1752 and the dates jumped 11 days from Sept. 2, 1752 on a Wednesday to the next day being Sept. 14, a Thursday.

During her State of the State address in January, Hochul mentioned two of her predecessors in the audience, George Pataki and David Paterson. Pataki won a landmark court case that reaffirmed the governor’s much stronger budget authority over the Legislature and Paterson later expanded that so that once April 1 occurs, the Legislature loses all ability to modify the governor’s bills to keep government open.

With the tools from Pataki and Paterson, Hochul has the powers to keep the ship afloat and steering straight. She apparently doesn’t want to go to war with Democratic supermajorities in both houses that might get ideas about veto overrides.

So New York waits to see what happens with housing construction incentives and tenant protections, the education funding formula, fixes to retail theft and illegal pot shops, as well as migrant funding and mayoral control of public schools.

Amid the nothingness, one good thing is that the state’s 1,350 judges get their long-delayed raises today, because the recommendations of a special panel were left alone. The panel will be meeting to consider raises for the Legislature in two weeks. That should be easy: zero for the Legislature which bypassed the commission last winter and gave themselves grossly inflated salaries to become by far the highest paid state legislature in the country. And they can’t even do their job.