Budget session off to slow start
-
- March
- 31
Adoption of a state budget got snarled today in the state Senate before the process even started.
Republicans so far haven’t shown up for a legislative session that was supposed to start at 9:30 a.m. A Republican spokesman said the minority members were waiting for information about aid to local school districts and other data before considering whether to vote for the bills.
But the Democrats think the Republicans are weighing whether to just try to delay the process and capitalize on the anger at higher taxes and spending increases that the public has been displaying since the $131.8 billion budget deal was announced on Sunday.
Republicans, who hold 30 of the 62 Senate seats and are in the minority this year for the first time since 1965, also might want to deny Democrats the bragging rights of getting a state budget passed before the midnight tonight deadline.
Passage of the budget is expected to go much smoother in the Assembly, where Democrats have a 109-41-seat majority over Republicans.
Senate Democrats issued a point-by-point description of the proposed budget this morning, saying it’s the first time a breakdown by budget area has been uploaded on the Web by the Senate.
—Jay Gallagher
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 9:58 am by Cara Matthews.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Print This Post
| 
Email This Post
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. 
