Paterson to agency heads: hold spending flat
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- September
- 5
 State agencies should spend no more next year than they are this year, Gov. Paterson told agency heads in a letter sent today.
“We cannot continue making excuses for why the state is unwilling to limit its expenses at a time when hard working New Yorkers are forced to do the same thing every day,’’ he said.
Holding spending flat will be particularly tricky, since most state workers this year have been granted four-year pay raises totaling 13 percent.
The “call letter’’ to agency heads is the first step in the process of putting together a budget for the next fiscal year, which starts April 1.
Lawmakers, who haven’t had a pay raise in a decade, are widely expected to vote to raise their pay, as well as judges and top state officials, including Paterson, some time after the November 4 elections and before the end of the year. The hikes would take effect in January.
But Paterson’s no-growth edict would not only make it virtually politically impossible for him to accept a raise from his $179,000-a-year salary next year, but also put more pressure on lawmakers to leave their base pay at $79,500 annually. (Most get extra stipends that puts the average pay at more than $90,000.)
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on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 5:06 pm by Jay Gallagher.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
