Yes, it’s Halloween night, but if you’re looking for some New York political news to watch, here’s two choices.
—State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno will be on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Show at 6:30 to rail against Gov. Spitzer’s drivers license plan. Dobbs has been extremely critical of the plan to give illegal immigrants drivers’ licenses and has made a nightly issue out of it.

He even called Spitzer an idiot, but then later apologized on the air.
—Speaking of Spitzer, he’s on Capitol Tonight at 8 p.m. to talk about his license proposal. The show is aired on Time Warner Cable in Albany, Binghamton, Syracuse and Rochester areas. 

Here’s some of the transcript from the show, dealing with the on the ongoing controversy over driver licenses to illegal immigrants:
“I have done precisely what the public sent me to Albany to do, which is to shake and rattle the cage of a system that was not responding to a changed economy, changed circumstances.  Inevitably in that context, there will be some for whom the rattling and the shaking isn’t so comfortable. 
“We are in the position we’re in right now because of the failure of Washington. Washington’s immigration policies have been a debacle.”
“You have a million people right now who are not in (the DMV) database.  And they’re floating out there unbeknownst to us.  That’s a hazard, that’s a risk.”

  Gov. Spitzer and Republicans actually had some nice things to say about each other today. That’s a man-bites-dog-style development because they have been mostly at each other’s throats for months.

  At an announcement of a $5 million grant to GE as part of a $39 million investment that will bring 500 well paying jobs to down-at-the-mouth Schenectady within three years, Spitzer actually praised three Republican lawmakers on the dais.

   Spitzer called the deal “truly a bipartisan effort.’’ At a similar announcement in Rochester two weeks ago, there was not a Republican elected official to be seen.

 ”We’re all on the same page with economic development,’’ said Sen. Hgh Farley, R-Niskayuna, Schenectady County.

   Farley was actually allowed to speak. Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco, R-Schenectady, was poised to tell a story about how his father worked in a GE foundry for 40 years, but was merely introduced and allowed to sit on the dais.

  “That’s OK, my mouth was full of saliva anyway,’’ Tedisco said later – right after he announced he and other GOP lawmakers are suing the governor to try to block his plan to issue drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants.

There’s a lot of debate today over Sen. Hillary Clinton’s remarks last night in a MSNBC presidential debate regarding Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to give drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants.
Republicans are claiming Clinton is flip-flopping and not giving a direct answer.
She didn’t say definitely whether she supports the governor, and essentially tried to blame the nation’s immigration problem on President Bush.
“This is where everybody plays ‘gotcha,”’ she said during the debate. “It makes a lot of sense. What is the governor supposed to do? He is dealing with a serious problem. We have failed, and George Bush has failed. Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do? No.”
Her remarks drew strong reaction from Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco, a leading opponent of Spitzer’s plan who today said he’s filing a lawsuit tomorrow to stop the policy from going forward.
“I think that once Senator Clinton gets done debating herself on whether she supports or opposes Governor Spitzer’s plan, hopefully she’ll share her answers with the New Yorkers she represents, ” he said.
In a follow-up statement just now, a Clinton aide said she “supports governors like Gov. Spitzer who believe they need such a measure to deal with the crisis caused by this administration’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
“As president, her goal will be to pass comprehensive immigration reform that would make this unnecessary.”

   In a rare piece of good news for a beleagured upstate city, Gov. Eliot Spitzer and GE officials are expected to announce later this morning that the company is going to add about 500 white-collar jobs in Schenectady.

  GE, which once employed about 40,000 workers in the city about 15 miles northwest of Albany but now has fewer than 4,000, will add engineers and other white-collar staff to help meet a growing demand for wind power. The firm is trying to expand its niche in the rapidly growing alternative-energy market.

   While Albany and the Hudson Valley have been flourishing for the past several years, Schenectady has been as depressed as any city in the region.

  Spitzer is expected to announce what state incentives were needed to help GE decide to locate the jobs in Schenectady instead of Atlanta, which was also in the running and usually cleans upstate’s clock in competition for investments.

  Many of New York’s state parks are crumbling and need $650 million to handle deferred maintenance, the state parks commissioner said at a hearing today.

    “The backlog of $650 million is urgent,’’ Parks Commissioner Carole Ash said at a budget hearing today.

    She pointed to a crumbling bulkhead that holds up a significant portion of Roberto Clemente State Park in Manhattan, a closed bridge in Niagara Falls, no public bathrooms on a heavily used level of Roberto Clemente State Park in Manhattan and scores of problems with basics like bathrooms, sewage systems and parking lots.

 Ash recommended that Gov. Eliot Spitzer and the Legislature add about $100 million to the parks’  capital budget this year to start to deal with the problem.

   Spitzer is due to deliver his budget plan to the Legislature in January. Lawmakers have until April 1 to adopt a spending plan. 

 The state has reached a deal on a new four-year contract with its largest employee union, Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced today.

   Under the agreement that still has to be ratified by the 70,000 members of the Civil Service Employees Association, workers will get a 3 percent raise retroactive to April 1 of this year, 3 percent raises next year and the year after and a 4 percent hike in 2010.

   The increase will cost taxpayers about $950 million over the course of the contract. Workers in the New York City metro area will get extra pay, sometimes of more than $3,000, to offset the higher cost of living in that part of the state.

  The pact also includes some changes in health care, but a Spitzer spokesman wasn’t able to say immediately how much those are worth.

  The pact leaves the Public Employees Federation, which has about 50,000 members who work for the state, as the largest union without a new contract. The old pacts expired on April 1.

  The four-year deal with CSEA means Spitzer won’t have to deal with a new contract before the 2010 election, if he decides to run for a second term.

< The state didn’t come close to breaking its all-time record for electricity demand this summer, according to a report issued today.

   Top day for electric use this year was 32,169 megawatts, on Aug. 8. That may sound like a lot, but it was almost 2,000 megawatts below the peak set on Aug. 2, 2006: 33,939 megawatts.

   This summer was about as hot on average as last year, but there were fewer exceedingly hot, humid days, according to the New York Independent System Operator, which runs the wholesale electricity market.
  “Once again, New York’s bulk electricity grid showed that it can take the heat,’’ said Mark Lynch, head of the New York ISO “As we forecasted in May, there were adequate supplies of electricity to safely and reliably meet electricity demand in New York State this summer.’‘

Today marked the first public event in a new process to develop an early state budget proposal. Members of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s Budget Office and legislative leaders heard from the leaders of the Education Department and Division of Criminal Justice Services on what they want included in next year’s spending plan.

The hearings continue Thursday and Friday, when the Division of Budget and lawmakers will hear proposals for funding in health care, mental health and social services,  and capital funding for parks, economic development and transportation. The public can tune in at www.budget.state.ny.us. (The hearings are at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Thursday, and 9 a.m., 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Friday.)

The governor and lawmakers agreed early in the year to revise the budget development process. The point of the “quick start” method is to increase accountability and allow time for the governor and heads of the Senate and Assembly to reach a consensus on revenue and expense estimates and release a report detailing them by Nov. 15. After that, the Division of Budget will hold a series of “town meetings” to educate the public about “impending budget challenges” and specific areas of the budget, Spitzer said in a statement.

“We cannot change the finish line for when the budget must be enacted, but we can move up the starting line,” the governor said.

Spitzer, who releases his budget proposal in January, said he anticipates a gap of $3.6 billion in 2008-09. Legislators have until April 1 to pass a budget.

The state Court of Appeals today overturned the death penalty of a 43-year-old Queens man convicted of killing five employees during the robbery of a Wendy’s restaurant in Queens in 2000.

   In a 4-3 decision, the court ruled that the state’s death-penaly statute is unconstitutional, and sent the case back to the Supreme Court for resentencing.

   The ruling effectively ends the chances of anyone being executed in New York unless the Legislature changes the statute to allow jurors to consider a life-without-parole sentence besides the death penalty. The Senate supports such a change, but the Assembly doesn’t.

   No one has been executed in New York since 1963. The Legislature reinstituted the law in 1995, but one one was put to death as a result.

 Former Spitzer Communications Director Darren Dopp, who earlier had promised to cooperate with a state Senate investigation of the use of State Police to gather information on Spitzer’s chief political rival, failed to provide information to a Senate panel today, as he earlier promised he would.

  Dopp’s lawyer, Terrence Kindlon, today sent a letter to the Senate Investigations Committee saying that the information the panel was seeking was “privileged and confidential.’’

   A spokesman for  committee chairman, Sen. George Winner, R-Elmira, pointed out that not complying with a subpoena from the Legislature is a Class A misdemeanor.

  The panel is looking at whether any laws need to be changed in the wake of Dopp and other administration officials gathering information on the travels of Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and releasing it to the media.

Dopp, 48, a Binghamton-area native, was suspended from his state job in July. He recently started working for a top Albany lobbying firm.