How to fix our broken budget process

Overdue budgets, closed-door meetings, no public debates: How did we end up with this mess of a budget process? The answer has its roots in partisan politics — with a big assist from the Court of Appeals.

Prior to the 1960s, late budgets were rare. Gov. Thomas Dewey sometimes sent his budget to the Assembly and Senate just weeks before the deadline, where it was promptly rubber stamped. Nelson Rockefeller, it was said, “owned one house of the Legislature and had a longterm lease on the other.” As the Legislature reformed itself and opened the process, and as divided government — with a Republican Senate and a Democratic Assembly — became the norm, so did late budgets. From 1985 through 2004, not a single budget was passed on time.

On-time budgets once again became more the norm with Andrew Cuomo, who was helped enormously by a 1998 Court of Appeals decision. Silver

v. Pataki effectively robbed the Legislature of its ability to modify gubernatorial proposals that are embedded in the budget. Instead of bargaining, the only leverage left to the Legislature in dealing with the governor was, and is, its ability to say no.

Cuomo became particularly adept at playing Senate Republicans against Assembly Democrats — allying with the Senate on one issue, the Assembly on another — to push budgets through. He also took increasing advantage of the court’s ruling by packing all manner of non-fiscal issues into his budget as a means of bypassing the normal legislative process.

Kathy Hochul, though lacking Cuomo’s deep pockets of political power, has maintained his increased proclivity to load the budget bill with items that have little or nothing to do with the budget itself. With the Legislature legally barred from altering a word of the policies spelled out in the executive budget, delay — in the hopes of forcing the governor to act — is the only tool left in its “power of the purse.”

The problem is not entirely procedural. Unlike Cuomo, Hochul must deal with large Democratic and mostly urban majorities in both houses of the Legislature (only one Democratic state senator does not represent an urban district). But the shadow of Silver v. Pataki continues to loom. And it badly distorts the legislative process as a whole.

Unlike almost all other proposed laws, those embedded in the budget do not progress through the standing committees to be vetted, debated and revised. Instead of extensive public hearings and open-floor debates, budget bills go through a single day or two of general hearings. They are debated only in the closed meetings of the governor and majority party leaders and in the secret conferences of parties. The press and the public can only guess whether the budget is delayed by disagreements over bail reform (the most likely problem this year), the budget itself, or something else.

Until the state constitution is amended to correct the court’s monumental mistake, there will be less and less public input to the legislative process — save from favored lobbyists with inside tracks — and almost none of the specialized deliberation, compromise and fine tuning that strong committees provide. Issues such as bail reform and affordable housing should be resolved through an open legislative process rather than the closed-door meetings of the governor and legislative party leaders.

The time has come for a constitutional amendment restoring open government and the fiscal role of the state Legislature.