NY budget may be ready by deadline, maybe

ALBANY -- Till now, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and legislative leaders have professed they've been making great progress toward adopting an on-time state budget.

If so, the next few days will be crucial to proving them right.

With the Legislature on board for broad spending cuts, the first-year Democrat would seem to have things going his way. But there is more than one tricky issue -- school aid, Medicaid, prison closures, economic development funds -- that could unravel any deal.

The Senate and Assembly have passed their own versions of a budget with spending totals that were remarkably similar to Cuomo's $132.9 billion -- leading legislators to suggest New York will meet the budget deadline for the first time since 2006. Some potential reasons: Democrats want their party's governor to succeed. Republicans like the lowered spending and taxes in Cuomo's proposal.

Philosophically, neither chamber wants to force Cuomo to use the extraordinary powers the courts gave the executive branch last year: the authority to attach his cuts to emergency spending bills after April 1.

"We really don't want to go down that route," said Assembly Majority Leader Ron Canestrari (D-Cohoes). "It's really confrontational and we don't really want to do that in a governor's first year."

Put the factors together and Cuomo "is very well situated," said Gerald Benjamin, a political scientist at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), whose Democrat-dominated chamber would seem to be the most likely to complain about Cuomo's call for $3.7 billion in cuts, said an early budget was possible.

But the sticking points are potentially divisive: prison closures, geographic distribution of proposed school-aid cuts and the fragile Medicaid package. Cuomo has bundled steep spending cuts with a cap on malpractice limits and a "living wage" for some health care workers as a way to get industry support. The Republican-led Senate has balked at the raise; the Democrat-dominated Assembly at malpractice caps.

Democrats want to extend an income-tax surcharge on high-earning New Yorkers -- which Cuomo and Republicans staunchly oppose. Republicans remain nervous about Cuomo's plan to close some state prisons.