Pork in the Shadows

From time immemorial, lawmakers have used pork to grease the legislative wheels — with efforts to ban the practice only driving it underground. Here in New York, that’s produced the abuse of the state Dormitory Authority.

Since 1998, the Times Union’s Chris Bragg reported Sunday, state lawmakers have spent $1.9 billion on nearly 6,000 projects financed by Dormitory Authority bonds.

The authority itself does plenty of good work, and has since the state created it back in 1944 solely to finance college construction.

Its current “add-on” role as pork conduit began in 1998, after then-Gov. George Pataki vetoed all of the Assembly’s member items. In the end, Pataki wound up cutting a deal to fund much of the same pork via a new Community Enhancement Facilities Assistance Program, run through the Dorm Authority.

A few years later, slush-fund spending for the state Senate got added to the mix. And — unlike the old member items — none of it was spelled out in the state budget, where the public could at least see the pork.

Worse, debt contracts by “independent” authorities faces fewer constitutional limits than borrowing by the state itself — which lets the slush-fund spending get even larger.

Longtime Assemblyman John McEneny of Albany, now retired, notes that governors and lawmakers have joined almost annually to create new pots of money for legislators’ pet needs ever since Pataki’s 1998 “cleanup.”

Thus, Gov. Cuomo made a big show of vetoing member items inserted by the Legislature into the budget in 2012 and again in 2013. But in that latter year, he joined with the Legislature’s leaders to create a new Dorm Authority slush fund, the State and Municipal Facilities Program. In the three years since, lawmakers have authorized $1.54 billion in bond sales for the program.

Bottom line: Many of the worst abuses of New York’s taxpayers now take place out of sight. How’s that for reform?