Governor Cuomo joins us today, Friday April 8, live at 11:06am to discuss his first 100 days in office as well as the legislative priorities he will push between now and end-of-session.

www.thecapitolpressroom.org to hear the interview in real time or via podcast.

After spending a few days revealing all the brightest treasures (or ugliest) in a recently passed state budget, reporters, analysts and policy wonks go on a dig.   

They take their tools and carefully sweep away the boring budget detritis that can mask a gem of fossilized quartz or a Java Man skull.  And after about a week or so, they usually find something they can hold up to the sky and say, “Wow.  People will be surprised that I found THIS in there.”

Here is one of those little nuggets that is in THIS year’s budget:

The budget provides a two-year appropriation and reflects permanent law changes to limit future school aid increases to growth in the New York state personal income rate.

What’s weird, is that no one had to break a sweat to dig it up — it was right there in the Governor’s executive budget summary.   But what does it mean?  ”Permanent law changes to limit school aid increases to growth in PIT?” 

Here in the Capitol Pressroom, we are conducting an ancillary dig… for information. 

Keep you posted.

Protesters were asked to leave the Capitol around 2ish.  That’s about an hour after the State Assembly adjourned. 

AQE’s Billy Easton tells our Jim Felitte that around 300 protesters stayed over night.

According to attorney Michael Kink who helped to negotiate the question of where the protesters could spend the night, it was agreed by both security and the leaders of the protest that the demonstrators could hole up for the night in Meeting Rooms 1 – 4 in the Empire State Plaza.

Nikki Jones of AQE tells me that a contingent of security guards kept an eye on the protesters from Meeting Room 5.

There were no incidents of anything… though I would imagine there were a few snorers.

At this hour demonstrators are gathering in front of the Governor’s office on the 2nd floor of the State Capitol to underscore their displeasure with the budget, specifically the discontinuation of the millionaire’s tax.

School Aid Runs  This is the raw material.  But for people who need to know asap, it’s best to view the source. 

As the day progresses, I will be distilling the information down for listeners/viewers in Buffalo, Roch, Syr, Bing and Platts.   For Albany, visit the Times Union’s website where Casey posted those numbers. 

– susan

Thank you Teri Weaver.

Albany —As protesters filled the Capitol late Wednesday night, state lawmakers passed a state budget bill that cuts aid to Onondaga County school districts by $24 million, or 4.7 percent.

The $132.5 billion plan includes $4.6 million less for the Syracuse City School District, according to school aid lists obtained by The Post-Standard. But the 1.8 percent cut in aid is much smaller than what Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed for Syracuse.

“That’s better than where we were at,” city schools Superintendent Daniel Lowengard said.

Because the Legislature restored some aid, the district expects to eliminate 500 positions from its payroll instead of the 584 it would have had to trim under Cuomo’s budget proposal, Lowengard said.

The Legislature was still in session at midnight. The Senate approved the entire budget. The Assembly approved the education bill, but was still working on other budget bills.

Under the approved cuts, the Fayetteville-Manlius School District will sustain an 11.6 percent cut in aid, the biggest drop in Onondaga County. Not counting building aid, F-M will receive $12.6 million from the state, nearly $1.7 million less than last year.

The Liverpool School District will see the smallest drop in school aid, 1.5 percent.

The new state aid figures are “a positive change for our district,” said Kraig Pritts, the superintendent of Tully schools, whose district will receive $352,474 less than last year, a 5.4 percent drop, excluding building aid.

To balance the budget, lawmakers were vote Wednesday night on a budget that cuts funding for schools and local governments across the state, to slash state agencies by as much as 10 percent, and to find nearly half a billion dollars in wage and benefits savings among state workers or lay people off.

Lawmakers hoped to pass the budget before midnight. It would be the first on-time budget since 2006.

As legislators reviewed the school aid bill, protesters who had filled the Capitol halls on Wednesday yelled taunts aimed at Cuomo, a Democrat who they said broke promises to schools and the poor in favor of real estate investors and Wall Street executives.

“Come out, come out, come out,” dozens of protesters chanted shortly after 7 p.m. outside the governor’s second-floor office suite. “Tell the people you let them down.”

He did not emerge through the handful of state troopers separating the protesters from the office hallway.

Lawmakers tweaked, but kept intact, most of Cuomo’s spending plan. Cuomo had proposed a $1.5 billion reduction in school aid. Legislators restored $272 million of that.

“Even in these difficult economic times, it was the best we could do in the face of a $10 billion deficit,” said Sen. David Valesky, D-Oneida, before the last round of voting began.

Lawmakers took up voting shortly after 9 p.m. on four bills in each house that dealt with aid to local communities, the court system, family assistance and health care.

Though the bills contained the heftiest parts of the budget, few details were known and lawmakers had only a few hours to look at the legislation before casting their vote.

Upstate University Hospital might emerge as a winner, of sorts. The budget legislation presented to lawmakers helped pave the way for a planned merger with Community General.

First, the legislation allows Community General workers to join the state’s pension program or remain in Community General’s retirement plan. As expected, the budget also restored $60 million for Upstate and two other teaching hospitals, money the governor had axed from his original budget.

“We went into this budget year knowing full well the fiscal challenges that New York was facing and this budget will go a long way towards meeting and solving those problems,” said Upstate President David Smith in a statement.

But work has just begun for Cuomo. Despite winning his streamlined spending plan, he set aside some campaign promises to help see the budget passed by the April 1 deadline. Now the governor will turn to issues that didn’t make it into the budget: easing property tax rates and state-required payments from local governments; more government consolidation; and a same-sex marriage bill.

And he’s in the midst of contract negotiations with the state’s two biggest unions and under pressure to persuade them to help find $450 million in workforce savings to make the budget work.

He’ll also have to try to win over parents like Eliza Sampson who are angry about his school aid cuts.

“I came because these budgets are affecting me and my family more than I ever imagined,” said Sampson, a mother of four with three kids at Elmwood Elementary School in Syracuse, who traveled to Albany for the first time Wednesday, wearing her “Protect Children Not Millionaires” T-shirt.

As the day wore on, shouts from Sampson and hundreds of other protesters grew louder in the Capitol. More state troopers were called in. So were 70 pizzas, which sympathetic legislative staffers had to help bring into the building.

The crowds prompted the Legislature to bring in extra security and close public viewing galleries in the House and Senate for the first time in decades.

Sampson, a member of Elmwood’s Family-Teacher Organization, said she’s worried about her kids’ schools. At Elmwood, the state’s budget cuts could change class sizes for pre-K, kindergarten, first- and second-grades.

“Who are you supposed to complain to,” she said, “if you can’t complain to them?”

Staff writer Elizabeth Doran contributed to this story. Contact Teri Weaver at tweaver@syracuse.com or 470-2274.

Jim Felitte our ace TV guy decided we should try to videotape my radio interview with Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos. We discussed the budget and whether or not he would be willing to talk about adjusting the school aid formula sometime in the future. He was noncommittal.

A recent report issued by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli indicates that while most schools will have enough money in their reserve funds to cover this year’s budget cuts, next year is another story.

And more bad news: the same report shows that school districts in the Finger Lakes and Central New York have fewer reserves to tap into than other parts of the state.

Over the week, the New York Times printed a very stark illustration of the disparity. The story compared two school districts, Syosset on Long Island which has a 188 million dollar budget; and Ilion in upstate which has a $25 million dollars annual budget. Because Syosset’s budget is so large, only 12% of the entire plan comes from state aid. Compare that with Ilion where state aid makes up 75% of its annual budget. Yet… thanks to the school aid formula that some lawmakers are not willing to change, both schools saw the same cuts.

We discussed the school aid formula with Comptroller Tom Dinapoli.

Legislative leaders apparently trust Andrew Cuomo.  At least more than they trust each other. 

Not that leaders had much of a choice. With Cuomo’s 70 percent approval rating and the power to shut down state government, the Governor held all the cards – and lawmakers knew it.  Here’s how Siena pollster Steve Greenberg put it to us, ”Speaker Silver’s members, like Skelos’ members will look to their leaders and say, ‘you did as good a job as you could boss, thanks.’”

It’s clear that lawmakers have decided to trust Andrew Cuomo by the way they will be divvying up prison closures.   They won’t be.   They are leaving to the Governor, with a few guiding principles courtesy of both conferences. 

Senator Michael Nozzolio sums up the Republican conference’s advice to the Governor this way, “They have accepted that any cuts should be made in a fair manner, and no one region be impacted by the prison closures.”

Legislative leaders rarely cede power in this way, and there’s a reason for that.  It’s risky. 

“The real test for Speaker Silver is how his members feel about his budget and we’ll learn that over the coming days. ” Greenberg says.

Here’s the issue:  While the Speaker may trust the Governor to be fair when closing prisons, and believes the Governor when he says he will push for rent regulations after the budget is passed, his members may not feel the same way. 

“The issue of rent control, rent regulation was not in the budget which was something that many of us from downstate had hoped to do, ” Queens Assemblyman Rory Lancman told us.

Like other downstate Democrats, Lancman is also unhappy about the demise of the so-called “Millionaire’s Tax”.  However, he feels that the budget pain will likely be somewhat lessened by partial restorations to schools and senior centers. 

But his constituents may feel differently. 

 ”We have to separate peoples’ outcry over the budget, from what is fair and reasonable. The state has no money.”

Meanwhile, Dean Skelos, the leader of the Repulican-led State Senate is also throwing his trust behind Cuomo when it comes to two issues critical to his conference: UB 2020 and a property tax cap.

The 3 men emerged from a room in the Capitol on Sunday with a budget agreement totaling 132.5 billion dollars.

It includes no new taxes, no member items, closes a $10 billion dollar budget gap, and reduces spending by 2-percent, a financial achievement not seen out of Albany in years.

Here are a few highlights:

The agreement includes Governor Cuomo’s two competitive grant proposals: one that funds Regional Economic Development Councils to the tune of $131-million dollars as well as one that will provide up to $500 million dollars in performance grants for public schools. Both pots of money had been reallocated by the other two houses of the legislature in earlier budget configurations.

This is one of a series of wins for Cuomo.

In all, there is $272 million dollars in restorations to education, including funding for schools for the blind and deaf. Both the SUNY/CUNY Systems and human services received moderate boosts of under 100 million dollars.

With a few small tweaks, the recommendations of the Governor’s Medicaid Redesign Team were adopted, sans the cap on medical malpractice awards. 

The plan also authorizes the 3rd “leg” of the Governor’s “special teams”: The SAGE Commission (”Spending & Government Efficiency Commission”) is now funded, and being asked to reduce state government by 20%.

Two items of note for upstate New York:

The Governor and the legislature have agreed to eliminate 3700 prison beds, though it’s not known which prisons will be affected. And, in a nod to the western New York delegation of lawmakers, the Governor has agreed to hold a summit to “discuss how make UB 2020 a reality”.

No word yet on when that summit will be scheduled.

For a few days, it looked like rent regulation and a property tax cap had found symbiotic toehold in the budget with both Speaker Silver and the Governor voicing support. But yesterday Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos told NYDN reporter Glenn Blain that he wasn’t thrilled with the idea: “Certainly, rent control is not until June 15th, so I don’t see the urgency of having that in the budget”. The 15th is the day current rent regulations expire in New York.

Rent control is a critical to Speaker Sheldon Silver’s largely downstate conference. Earlier today, the Capitol Report team asked the Speaker for reaction to Skelos’ desire to push-off housing issues later into the session. Silver sounding resigned, said that while dealing sooner with these issues rather than later would be his choice, it’s nothing he can’t wait for, and it won’t interfere with budget negotiations.