Underlying Questions

The fact that the state legislature
managed to buck the Governor and push
the school budget vote set for this month
back a few weeks is good news. So is
the fact that both Senate Majority Leader
Joe Bruno, the state's second most
powerful Republican, and Assembly
Speaker Sheldon Silver, the state's top
Democrat, are using their clout to counter
the governor's planned $4 billion in cuts to
the likes of school aid, health care, and
college tuition assistance.
The idea that our county leaders
were able to come together and finally
agree on a legislative plan for the next
decade is also laudable, showing at least
some sense of bipartisan progress. As
are the recent actions of the region's only
true communal effort, the Catskill
Watershed Corporation, to continue
passing on loan funds, and grants, to help
create sustainable growth, and a larger
regional identity, on the part of the
Catskills.
But behind the good news, on all
accounts, are troubling circumstances
that need addressing.
The state budget, for some arcane
reason not revealed to us plebian voters,
continues to be worked out behind closed
doors between the governor, Bruno and
Silver. The result is an opaqueness that is
threatening. Why? Because we can never
fully know what sorts of deals get made
as the three parties in this most important
of processes -- which decide both our
taxes, and what programs get funded,
and how -- make their deals and
compromises.
Right now it looks like the two
legislative leaders are the good guys, the
governor the heavy. Yet that's just
appearances. Out of past sessions,
similarly acrimonious and epic-sounding,
came decisions to allow gambling in the
old Borscht Belt, to reindustrialize the
Greene and Columbia county portions of
the Hudson River, and who knows how
many other items we won't be able to see
any results of for quite some time yet.
The result, on a local level, is that our
own ability to vote for or against a school
budget has been undermined. We are not
really in control of any of the figures at
play, excepting as a means of
acrimonious protest. Which does our
children, the object of all such politics,
poorly.
Similarly, the back room decision
between Republican and Democrat party
leaders to forego an accepted
redistricting plan, arrived at via a
combination of petition drives, letters to
local editors, and judicial interference,
seems disingenuous at first. Sure, we
measly voters, the electorate, still have a
chance to have our say on a pair of
referendums on the ballot come Election
Day. But they are on issues that have
been decided, in those same back
rooms, not to have any effect for the next
9 years. So why ask our opinion in the
first place?
Most of these represent
longstanding problems of democracy.
How DO you keep those we've elected to
power from moving beyond our control, so
they start controlling us? Budgets have
been officially late, and secretly
negotiated, on a state level for nearly two
decades now, and much longer if one
considers the realities of our political
system. The county legislature was set up
with an eye to political power, and not just
representation, from its beginnings in
1968 (a year of major political
awakenings if ever there was one).
But some of these problems seem
to be worsening, instead of getting better.
Partly, that's because of the growing
complexity of everyday life, and
government. As things become
specialized, we in the general public are
told to stay out of business we don't
understand. Like the judicial system's
movement against personal civil rights,
or citizen's rights to question big
business.
Could it be that the 2000 Election,
when a clear popular majority vote was
overturned by an appointed judiciary, was
a signal? Could it be that the move of
more and more decisions to back room
negotiation, often (as in the recent county
redistricting case) under threat of legal
harassment, is cynical in intention? Has
our two party system rendered the ideal of
public compromise obsolete?
Only an increase in public
participation in all our governmental
processes can say. If our system is
working, the increase in voices at town,
school board, county, state and federal
meetings, in person or via proxy, will be
heard, will be published, will have in
effect. And if it isn't, things will simply get
quieter, with an increasing sense that
government is for the governors, and not
really in the public's purview, as
democracy, and the ideal of all republics,
once asserted.