Governor Cuomo's State of the State Address

It was big, it's ambitious and.... it's confusing. The Governor has to be given credit for a number of things. He really does have a skill of bringing people together. Having the Speaker of the Assembly and the Leader of the Senate speaking at what traditionally is the Governor's event, accomplishes a lot, and probably prevents an opposition type response. It's a pretty brilliant political move. Seems small but does something major on the cooperation side of things. Sometimes perception really does become reality. We also all learn, at some point, that it's harder to say something bad or nasty about someone when they are right there looking you in the eye.

The Governor also knows how to reach out to constituencies and to argue his points with logic and humor. I personally think his argument against finger printing people for food stamp eligibility really did help people to see that there's something pretty basically unsound about such a policy. But we'll see how successful he is with getting it changed.

Two big issues, hydro-fracking and abuse and neglect of people with developmental disabilities (as purported by outside reporting) weren't discussed in the actual presentation but people who have seen the text say these items were written about. My own sense is that the Governor ran into a time problem rather then a conscious effort to avoid these topics. The speech did go on for close to an hour mid-day and any good orator has a sense of when the audience is getting tired, etc.

So that's the positive side. The hard part of his message really was understanding it. The state is facing a $2 Billion deficit that seems to grow if you blink an eye. Human service, health care providers, educators and municipalities have been belt tightening, laying off employees, restructuring and focusing on shared services. Their decisions and actions have been painful. So where does $25 Billion come from? How do you expand and renovate the Javits Center in NYC when other states and cities are left holding the bag on financing packages for similar expansions/developments that just haven't seen the increase in conferences and tourism in a bad economy? How do you rebuild Buffalo and get at it's particular problems and leave out Rochester, Syracuse and other cities? Where are the federal and private investment dollars going to come from? That's my confusion. I may be thick and I may not understand economics. I just don't get how or where that $25 Billion is coming from.

I really do wish him the best of luck and hope there's an economic plan behind this that makes sense. It would be wonderful to see that commitment to our cities, our bridges and infrastructure, to our healthcare and educational systems. The Governor's budget will be presented in the next few weeks and perhaps we'll have a better understanding of how this will all work.