NY Daily News
Albany
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/08/05/2010-08-05_news_flash_albany_does_good.html
Don’t be fooled by the grousing and grumbling about how useless everybody and everything in the state capital is supposed to be.
The budget was, indeed, four months late and filled with fiscal gimmicks. But an orderly ledger book is not the only measure of progress in a state of 19 million.
Gov. Paterson and state lawmakers deserve kudos for progress on key laws that will make life more safe and fair for working-class New Yorkers.
Credit also goes to an army of underpaid community advocates whose years of patiently badgering Albany power brokers to do the right thing finally paid off.
First and foremost, the Senate approved a one-year moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, a form of natural gas drilling that environmentalists say has polluted drinking water in other states.
That sets up a fall Assembly vote – and likely approval by Paterson – that will kill hydrofracking until the risks are better understood and controlled.
In a long-overdue victory for democracy, New York this week becomes the second state (after Maryland) to end the disgraceful practice of counting prison inmates as residents of the remote, mostly rural counties of their captivity rather than the places where they actually live. For a generation and more, upstate counties with prisons got an extra helping of public money thanks to a captive populace that pols knew full well would never use local schools, libraries, theaters, job training programs and other amenities.
The distorted count, in turn, has starved downstate inner-city neighborhoods of badly needed resources because many health, education and welfare programs are allocated according to population.
The unjust arrangement lasted for decades because the gerrymandering padded the size of upstate Senate districts – giving the Republican majority the power to resist any reform. As I noted in a 2006 column, counting inmates at their last known home address instead of in prisons would cause seven Senate districts – six of them held by Republicans – to fall below a legally mandated minimum size.
But year after year, GOP pols used the prisoners to inflate their power – and then grotesquely used that power to vote for harsh measures like the Rockefeller drug laws that ensured a large supply of “constituents” serving long sentences.
“[Nearly] everyone comes home. And they come home to areas with lots of social problems. Needless to say, the conservative Republicans from upstate are not supporting more funding for after-school programs, for mental health counseling” and other measures, says state Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan, Bronx).
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/08/05/2010-08-05_news_flash_albany_does_good.html#ixzz1FMaUkoE3
