Skelos To Dems: Repeal Taxes In 2008-09 Budget
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- February
- 26
With the state set to receive an infusion of $24.6 billion in federal stimulus aid, Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos, R-Nassau County, said today that Gov. David Paterson and Democrats in the majority should repeal the $250 million in fees and taxes on health-insurance costs approved by lawmakers last month.
They should also return the $306 million that was swept from the state Power Authority to close the $1.6 billion budget gap in the 2008-09 fiscal year, which ends March 31, he said. He said the money should be used to lower energy costs for upstate businesses.
And they should also eliminate the $620 a year tuition increase at SUNY; the money is being used almost entirely to help close the state’s $14 billion budget gap in the 2009-10 fiscal year, Skelos said.
Skelos reiterated his concerns that the stimulus money will not be fairly distributed around the state, saying talk of building high-speed rail in upstate New York is a good idea but shouldn’t be a substitute for aid that would help the upstate economy now.
“The reality is that high-speed will not happen for another 10, 15, 20 years. It involves billions and billions of dollars,” he said. “So I don’t want the governor to say to the western part of the state or upstate New York, your piece of the action is going to be a high-speed rail, 15, 20 years from now. They need immediate stimulus money in order to start creating jobs in that part of the state.”
Earlier in the day, Paterson knocked lawmakers on WNYC radio for fighting over where the aid will go, citing the state’s dire fiscal condition.
“We’re in an emergency, we’re in a crisis,” he said. “One of the things that is disturbing me about a lot of people right now is they acknowledge that we are in a crisis in the academic sense, but then when you try to respond to the crisis, you start hearing regional and political interests.”
This entry was posted
on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 5:35 pm by Joseph Spector.
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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. 
