Senate Democrats To Attend Paterson’s Address (Updated)
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- November
- 6
The Senate Democratic majority will now attend Gov. David Paterson’s address Monday to a joint session of the Legislature, a spokesman said this morning.
“They still don’t want to, but out of respect for the governor’s office they are going to attend,” said spokesman Austin Shafran.
Shafran said the conference expects all members to attend Monday and Tuesday’s special session. Several lawmakers are in Puerto Rico for an annual conference.
But Shafran said that Senate Democratic Leader John Sampson and Senate President Malcolm Smith are due back Sunday evening.
Yesterday afternoon, several Senate Democrats said they were unaware that a boycott was afoot and that they planned to attend the speech with the other conferences in the Senate and the Assembly.
The address is scheduled for 3 p.m. Monday.
Senate Democrats were facing criticism if they weren’t going to attend.
Sen. Thomas Libous, R-Binghamton, said yesterday it would be disrespectful to the governor.
“They’re showing their dysfunction and quite frankly they are not being very respectful,” Libous said. “The governor is the governor and if he’s calling us back to share with us how he wants to address a very serious deficit problem, they should be there along with all the members of the Legislature.”
Updated: Shafran called back to clarify his early remarks.
“It’s not that they don’t want to attend,” he said. “They’re certainly going to attend, they just want to make sure that it’s a productive use of the time and by that I mean that they continue to negotiate on coming to an agreement on a responsible budget plan.”
This entry was posted
on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 10:49 am 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. 
