The budget resolutions approved this week in the state Senate and Assembly failed to curtail spending or, in the Senate’s case, be backed up by new revenues, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top budget official said Thursday in a statement.
Division of Budget Director Robert Mujica called the Senate’s proposal “wholly incredible” for raising spending by almost $3.5 billion without corresponding spending cuts or tax increases.
The Assembly’s spending increase is also “not acceptable and is still billions out of balance.”
And the statement knocks the Senate plan for not funding a $40 million tax assessment for Nassau County.
“It is another obvious political charade,” Mujica said.
“It is like the $3 billion New York was supposedly giving to Amazon. It never existed. There is no funding for Nassau’s tax assessment, there is no $3.5 billion of extra spending as the Senate promises its supporters. The continued creation of these false political expectations makes the reality of an on-time, responsible government budget virtually impossible.”
The statement will likely only lead to more grumbling from Democrats in the Senate and Assembly amid an increasingly truculent budget season.
On Wednesday, Mujica, along with secretary to the governor Melissa DeRosa held a press conference with Counsel Alphonso David to announce a reversal in cuts to Medicaid spending, but also knocked the legislative budget resolutions, which do not carry the force of law and largely aspirational documents.
DeRosa in one instance said the budgets were written in “fantasy land” and lacked grounding in reality.
Cuomo earlier this week had suggested Assembly Democrats were in the pocket of the state’s teachers union for opposing a permanent cap on property tax increases while also saying Senate Democrats were not accustomed to governing.
The press conference came after one lawmaker, Sen. Zellnor Myrie, contended that Cuomo’s criticism of Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the first black woman to the hold post, was gender and race based.
Democrats have quietly pointed to Mujica’s resume as a Republican Senate Finance Committee official before joining the Cuomo administration, as well.
On Twitter, Senate Democratic conference spokesman said of Mujica’s statement that it “sounds like this statement was written in fantasyland.”
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