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Contact Me Welcome to LizKrueger.com I'd love to hear from you. You can contact me by clicking here.	News Journal News, April 5, 2006 Albany's Blank Check Editorial So, you feeling generous? Well, you are, whether you feel it or not. That's the upshot of the newly posted data at the Web site of Empire Center for New York State Policy, a project of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Visit it, at empirecenter.org, and see just how often you say "yes" to state spending for church groups, synagogues, baseball teams, soccer teams, roller hockey, cheese museums . . . The fiscally conservative group has opened what it calls a "peep-hole" into the state Legislature's annual pork barrel, posting the list of "member items" for the last three budget years, a 1,154-page list of pet projects, stretching from one end of the state to the other, totaling a prodigious $480 million. The compilation of some 23,000 items is Exhibit 1 in the continuing indictment against Albany as a place where major economic decisions are made behind closed doors. How else would something called the Cuba Cheese Museum get $5,000 in taxpayer dollars, or the Flushing Meadow Soap Box Derby score $5,000, or the Back to Basics Outreach Ministries Inc. another $5,000, without any public explanation? The Empire Center secured the data under the state's Freedom of Information Law, but FOIL only does so much; the lists don't tell who secured the grants or what purpose they serve. Each year, the spending is memorialized in a "memorandum of understanding" reached by the Three Men in a Room: Gov. George Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. And that's pretty much it as far as scrutiny goes. Even most lawmakers are left in the dark, which recently prompted Senate Minority Leader David Paterson and Sen. Liz Krueger to press for more disclosure. "If you have three men making a secret deal, signing off on it, and they still don't give you a copy, that should send a red flag," Krueger told The Associated Press last month. State Comptroller Alan Hevesi has pressed for more disclosure, as have good-government groups and editorial writers, who have turned blue in face advocating up-or-down votes on the "slush fund" projects. Albany lawmakers, however, prefer the status quo — and the lack of accountability it affords. The vast majority of projects are probably on the up and up, but the scarcity of detail really makes that conclusion guess work. We just have to hope that the $7,500 to Faith Baptist was spent wisely, likewise the $50,000 to the Greene International Golf Association, and the $5,000 to Rye Youth Council, and the $7,000 to African American Men of Westchester Inc. A more transparent funding scheme, of course, would not depend on wishful thinking. There would be fully disclosed funding criteria and accountability. Everyone would understand who got what and for what purpose. Taxpayers and their Albany agents, in the Legislature and governor's office, are past time for insisting upon better. Frankly, given the belt-tightening going on everywhere, we're just not that generous or that trusting.
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