A conversation with Gov. David A. Paterson

Joye Brown

May 6, 2008

A conversation with Gov. David A. Paterson

At Hempstead and during your sermon at Antioch, you put outlines around your priorities as governor. ... You hit on education.

When I was living in Hempstead, the ... school district was well within compliance with the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation order, but Hempstead had a segregated school within it. When I was in the fourth grade, I was one of the students who was sent to bring integration to that school.

I think people in communities [such as Hempstead] think they ... are in some of the most affluent counties in terms of receiving education money, but the money never trickled down to their neighborhoods.

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And I'm saying, we are going to set up a system which is fair.

You also hit on child health, and a program the state funded to cover health insurance for 400,000 children.

We were able to in a sense accomplish what the [national government] could not. ... We've insured basically all of the children of New York state ... some of the families are going to have to remit out-of-pocket costs for that, families that make $60, $70, $80,000, but they can still get the health insurance. ... It will cover a lot of middle-class people.

Newsday's written a lot on the state pension system and other abuses.

That's the problem with a lot of these localities where you don't have much accountability or much redress in terms of investigation. ... You all had a story ... about somebody who was collecting $500,000 a year?

That's exactly the problem when you try to have these local entities operating without suitable oversight. We have about 650 public authorities and then we have school districts, and then we have those overlapping districts and there's no one person [accountable]. The other problem is that the district attorneys burn up most of their energy on violent crime, so they are not as proficient in these white-collar situations as we would like them to be.

And so then we are left to the attorney general's office. But when you think about it, you probably have more local government authorities than they have lawyers in the AG's office, for all duties.

... This is where our desire to truncate a lot of these different decision-making authorities, to have fewer of them, to merge them at some point ... [He said he would prefer to have services, such as sanitation, report to town board] ... not reporting to some of these sort of entities that no one keeps an eye on and they become patronage mills.

There are too many opportunities for people to slip between the cracks and do whatever it is that they want to do. And then we get left paying for it.

Now, the governor of New Jersey has threatened to cut funding to smaller municipalities if they don't merge for cheaper, more efficient government.

I am not ready to go that far in terms of saying it, but if we get the lack of cooperation that the governor of New Jersey got, believe me, we will wind up where he is. But I prefer to remain optimistic.

What's your assessment on the state's budget?

When you have $21 billion in debt over the next three years, somebody was not thinking about where the national economy was. ... All of the indications have been there that there was going to be a problem for the last 18 months.

What about affordable housing?

I think it is the most difficult problem Long Island has. ... It's funny, when I was living on Long Island no one really thought about it. We are going to be trying to create decent and affordable housing all the way to the end of Montauk Point.

And immigration?

I think immigration struggles are classically more pronounced during economic hardship. That's when the newcomers to our society are battling those who have been here, for jobs. I think this is all about economic development and job creation. ... And I think more and more that has manifested itself into what is really a national tension on immigration, even as we all recognize that we are all immigrants here. I want to try and shift that discussion away from the prejudice and the anger to the fact that we can get the people who have lived here working again and able to own their homes.

Foreclosures in Nassau and Suffolk counties are 23 percent of foreclosures around the state. So, obviously, when people are losing their homes, anybody who is perceived to be coming here as new, there is going to be tension in that area.

... When I was living on Long Island in the '70s [when South American and other immigrants were arriving here] ... the housing and employment opportunities were mammoth. And that is when Suffolk County started to grow as a region. In those days, you didn't feel that tension.

You also said, more than once today, that you want to be the governor who brings New Yorkers back to New York?

A lot of my old friends from school now live out of state. I mean an overwhelming number of them, living in Texas, in South and North Carolina, in Georgia, a couple of them in Vegas, because of the taxes, because of the quality of life. ... We want to bring them back. I want all my friends to come home.