Crain’s Insider – Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Crain’s Insider

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Today’s News Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Deadline? What Deadline?

The state will miss tomorrow’s deadline to pass a bill on health insurance exchanges—and its best chance to access up to $100 million in federal grants from a fund that will be depleted over the coming months. Health Committee Chairman Kemp Hannon said the state Senate is likely to consider the bill before the next deadline, Sept. 30. With a final deadline for New York to pass an exchange bill still three months away, Hannon is neither hurried nor worried. “New York has already received two [exchange] grants, more than any other state,” he said. Given another chance to access the pool, he said, Republicans did not want to rush to pass the exchange bill in the legislative session that ended last week.

Albany’s Green Thumb

State legislators failed to take steps to curb carbon emissions, regulate wastewater or champion solar energy this year. But the New York League of Conservation Voters’ progress report for the 2011 legislative session, to be released today, nevertheless gives Albany a passing grade on the environment. Lawmakers passed a new law on power plant siting as well as the Complete Streets bill, which requires that public roads accommodate cyclists and pedestrians. The report also will praise legislators for not sacking the state’s $134 million Environmental Protection Fund.

Freelancers Find Friends in Unusual Places

The first bill in the country expanding wage-theft protections to freelancers cleared the Assembly last week, and the 90,000-member Freelancers Union is counting on its growing strength in the suburbs and traditional Republican strongholds to win passage in a special Senate session this fall. The Senate version is sponsored by Daniel Squadron, D-Brooklyn; Marty Golden, R-Brooklyn; and Andrew Lanza, R-Staten Island. The group has 1,500 members in Golden’s district, 1,600 on Staten Island, and 9,100 in Westchester and on Long Island combined. Unpaid wages cost New York freelancers $4.7 billion and the state $323 million in tax revenues in 2009, according to the group.

Class Size Rise

The Department of Education has yet to inform school principals of what the maximum class sizes will be in the fall, but the student population is expected to rise by just over 1% while the teacher head count falls by 2,600, or 3.5%. That means a class that had 30 children this year will have about 31.5 next year. It will be the fourth consecutive year that class size increases, and the jump will probably be the largest in a decade, advocacy group Class Size Matters predicts.

Bloomberg’s puzzling budget strategy

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Finance Committee Chairman Domenic Recchia can take credit for restoring teacher jobs—a timely diversion when the council approves a $66 billion budget that includes a 2.7% reduction in city head count, the largest since Mayor Mike Bloomberg started cutting staff three years ago.

“The mayor succeeded in keeping the focus of everyone on his [teacher] layoffs, but I don’t think it was intentional,” said Carol Kellermann, president of the Citizens Budget Commission.

Bloomberg’s budget strategy puzzled insiders. The proposed layoffs were not intended to be a diversionary tactic, but were widely believed to be leverage to win a change to the last-in, first-out policy. But that trial balloon deflated, in part because previously threatened teacher layoffs had not materialized.

“Threatening something most people think you’re not going to do to get something that most people think you’re not going to get is just weird,” said Nicole Gelinas, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The administration took a team approach to the budget. Budget Director Mark Page crunched numbers, and Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson explained them on Inside City Hall . But no one was authorized to make changes, an insider says, until First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris stepped in to restore funding cuts to nonprofits.

“Patti Harris made a lot of decisions this time,” the insider said. “When people wanted something, they called Patti. That was regarded as something new. There wasn’t one guiding hand; it was done by committee.”

Council members won permanent additions to the budget, such as $14 million “baselined” for senior centers and $20 million for CUNY. But they had to spend $41 million to keep fire companies open. The mayor had said it would take $55 million to avoid closures because of overtime costs, which will be covered by City Hall.

Budget watchers would have preferred that the mayor had bargained with workers to get them to pay more of their health care costs, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo did with state unions. That would have created savings in this year’s budget, Gelinas said. Instead, Bloomberg pushed pension reform, which went nowhere in the state Legislature.

At A Glance

MOVING IN:  Darren Suarez has joined the Business Council of New York State as director of government affairs. Suarez has been a government analyst for Hinman Straub and a program director for environmental and economic development for the state Senate.