ALBANY — A Buffalo carousel got $600,000.
The New York Shakespeare Festival got $250,000 more.
Sing Sing Prison Museum got just $125,000 — while millions went to nonprofits focused on “safety and restorative justice.”
Those amounts were parceled out from billions in so-called “lump sum” spending approved by Albany Democrats last year — and they’re back for more.
A watchdog report released Friday found that Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed budget would authorize $14.8 billion in spending without saying how it would actually get disbursed — opening the door to “waste and corruption.”
“One of the responsibilities of elected leaders is to tell the people where the money goes,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, which commissioned the report along with Reinvent Albany.
“Telling the people, ‘Oh, we’re going to decide later out of the public view, and then we’ll report on it at some other time — most of it,’ that’s not the way to both get the most out of your money and to be accountable. But that’s what New York State does too often,” Rein added.
As proposed by Hochul, the $14.8 billion would go into two pots covering 156 total proposals — $8 billion in “emergency” spending and $6.8 billion more in a collection of funds nominally devoted to a plethora of causes.
Here are a few examples of how state officials disbursed such funds last year:
- The Assembly backed $600,000 for the Buffalo Heritage Carousel
- Stony Brook University got $3.5 million for an “Agriculture Consumer Science Center” courtesy of the state Senate
- New York City received $13.1 million for “probation services” from the Hochul administration while other counties got smaller amounts
- Dozens of nonprofits and counties got five-to-seven-figure handouts for “pretrial services” from the Executive Mansion
- A long list of organizations received grants for causes like promoting jazz music among “underserved communities.”
The problem with such spending is not necessarily how the funding was eventually used, good government groups say, but that it was approved without explicit authorization in the annual state spending plan.
“Having all these projects see the light of day before the spending decisions are made would be really helpful because then you’d have to justify them in a much more public way,” Rachel Fauss of Reinvent Albany told The Post.
“How do we know how this all fits together? And when it’s done piecemeal, and it’s done outside of the budget, you can’t get a comprehensive look at if all the spending decisions make any sense,” she added.
This opaque approach to state spending also leads to a situation where pay-to-play politics can thrive, according to the report.
“Both watchdog groups and the Office of the State Comptroller have issued repeated warnings about the elevated risk of waste and corruption from lump sum spending,” the groups say.
Past criminal cases against former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, former Lt. Gov. Brian Benjamin, and former state Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith have all hinged on allegations tied to the practice.
And while the public gets left in the dark about how their tax dollars are getting spent – Hochul, state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers), and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx) can use the money to punish or reward their political friends and enemies.
“Because distribution of these funds is controlled by the Executive, legislative leadership, or in combination, the funds can be used to incentivize legislators to support certain policies or proposals,” the report states.
This leaves individual lawmakers dependent on the so-called “three people in a room” to bring home the bacon for their constituents, which in turn can affect their future political careers.
“Control over lump sum appropriations also enables the Governor to offer funding to legislators and the legislative leaders in exchange for support of the Governor’s budget priorities,” the report adds.
The Hochul administration does release some details of how the state spends billions in discretionary funds — but advocates say that database is in need of updating.
“Right now, it doesn’t have all of the lump sums and it doesn’t have enough details,” Fauss said.
“It’s good [Hochul] created it, but there’s a long way to go.”
As recently as a decade ago, the budget would include so-called “member items” backed by individual legislator, making it easy for ordinary members of the public to find out who directed money where.
“Discretionary funds that look a lot like member items morphed into lump sum appropriations,” the report states.
“While lump sums were not new, eliminating member items may have had the unintentional consequence of driving more discretionary funding activity into these less accountable and more opaque pots.”
The $14.8 billion figure could also grow as Hochul, Heastie and Stewart-Cousins get ready to blow by the April 1 budget deadline amid divisions on overhauling bail reform and promoting affordable housing.
“Governor Hochul’s Executive Budget makes transformative investments to make New York more affordable, more livable and safer, and she continues to work with the legislature to deliver a final budget that meets the needs of all New Yorkers,” said gubernatorial spokeswoman Hazel Crampton-Hays, who declined to comment on the report or explicitly defend the spending.
Reps for Heastie and Stewart-Cousins did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
