ALBANY – The new $77.5 billion state budget completed yesterday is stuffed with pork to fund lawmakers’ favorite pet projects.
From the Holocaust Museum to the National Distance Running Hall of Fame, the budget contains $150 million in spending on local projects.
There is funding for the Classic Car Museum, an equine testing program at Cornell University, and an organization known as “Pheasants Forever.”
And there’s $7,500 for the Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of Antique Motorized Fire Apparatus in America. The group is dedicated to the “historically accurate restoration of a 1923 Ahrens-Fox pumper truck.”
“Lawmakers measure their worth in Albany on how well they bring home the bacon,” Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group said. “It’s all about the ribbon-cutting, constituent-pleasing aspect of the state budget.”
The lawmakers, however, say the pork projects – known as “member items” – allow them to funnel state money for important local projects.
A look through the budget finds funding for hundreds of youth leagues, senior organizations and arts programs.
The $150 million in pork is separate from the whopping $200 million in discretionary funds that legislative leaders and the governor will get to carve up as they see fit. That money has not yet been earmarked for specific items.
NYPIRG and other good government groups say the pork process is too secretive and political. The projects, they say, only surface just as lawmakers start to pass the budget.
They say the process should be more open, with public debate to ensure taxpayer money goes to the most worthwhile projects.
Conservative organizations believe pork projects, worthy as they may be, should not be funded with state dollars.