NY editorials: Redistricting, NY budget...

Compiled by The Associated Press

THE BUFFALO NEWS, April 2, on redistricting reform and the state Senate Republicans:

New Yorkers, if you are counting on your Republican-led State Senate to stay true to its promise of impartial, independent redistricting, you have been had. The Republicans have slithered around their past commitments with a ruse that treats voters like fools.

You could see it coming. State lawmakers in abundance signed on to a pledge laid down last year by Edward I. Koch, a former New York City mayor, to leave this year's decennial redistricting to a special panel. In theory, these citizens would not care about favoring one political party over another when they drew new legislative districts. But when it came time to deliver, the Senate's Republican conference took a powder.

Among the maladies plaguing New York is Albany's unwillingness to stage fair elections. Its decision-makers dearly protect a system rigged to keep incumbents in power, and those incumbents give us the same old, same old. It keeps them in fine fettle at the expense of everyone else. Independent redistricting would be one good-sized step in the right direction.

Alas, the right to redraw district boundaries to protect the incumbents was at the heart of last year's hotly fought Senate campaigns. And that's really what fueled the see-saw battle between Republicans and Democrats these last few years. Each party wanted to control the redistricting process so it could ride out the decade without further fear.

Please spare us the argument that the Democrats would have taken the same weaselly route if they controlled the Senate. Of course they would have. But the Republicans wanted to lead, and they now have that chance. What they have done is to lead this stab at reform into retreat.

The Senate's top Republican, Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Rockville Centre), served as flag-bearer for the collapse. He and his Republicans recently proposed a more elaborate way to reform the redistricting process -- through a constitutional amendment. Had this been proposed a few years ago, it would have been heralded as a fine idea. "Instead it's an effort to derail reform," says Blair Horner, a longtime Albany watcher with the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Here's why: Changing the state constitution requires a proposal to be approved by two successive state legislatures and then approved by New York voters. All that could not occur until 2013, under the best of circumstances -- too late for the State Legislature elections next year.

Last fall, Skelos signed Koch's "New York Uprising" pledge along with all of his Republican senators and Senate candidates. He chided Democrats, then in the majority, for being slow to commit. Then he went all squishy. And his Republican conference tagged along.

It's not too late for them to show signs of remorse and honor. Senators, how about it?

www.buffalonews.com

THE AUBURN CITIZEN, April 3, on the New York State budget:

Journalists' email inboxes were filling up quickly Thursday with press releases about the state budget that had been passed in the early morning hours that day.

Most of the press releases blasted the spending plan. Advocates for the health care industry, the education system, the environment, the judicial branch, social services programs all had harsh words for Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the legislature.

But while there's no mistaking that these groups and many others will feel pain from this budget, the press release barrage actually reflected why this budget was one of the most responsible approved in Albany in years, perhaps decades. Badly needed spending cuts (actual cuts, not cuts to an expected cost increase) were made, and they were made across the board.

We often hear groups accuse government of balancing a budget "on the backs of ..." and then insert a name, such as students, the elderly, the middle class.

This budget is being balanced on all of our backs, and because we're all going to share in this burden, the state should be better positioned than it has been in years to go forward.

What makes this accomplishment even more remarkable is that it came together on time -- the state spending plan is by law supposed to be approved before April 1, but Albany has a terrible track record in that regard. The budget cuts spending in an election year, and amazingly, lawmakers even agreed to give up the hundreds of millions of dollars in pork-barrel funds they've been so fond of passing out during campaign seasons in years past. This budget agreement came together in a bipartisan way, as the Republican-led Senate and Democratic-led Assembly reached an accord on some minor changes to the Democratic governor's proposal.

With the budget passed, we now hope to see the same spirit of cooperation and responsible governance over the next three months as lawmakers and the governor move forward with this year's legislative session.

auburnpub.com

THE JOURNAL NEWS of White Plains, April 2, on toughening Nuclear Regulatory Commission relicensing reviews of old nuclear power plants:

The Obama administration is weeks away from reporting results of the safety review of U.S. nuclear plants ordered after Japan's catastrophe, but a commonsense recommendation -- put forth by scientists and New York officials -- has already emerged: the need to bolster the relicensing process for plants like Indian Point to include the most up-to-date science and information about seismic activity and threats.

The scope of the prevailing relicensing assessment focuses on issues concerning plant aging -- essentially how a plant has been maintained. Inexplicably, that otherwise painstaking assessment does not consider the bounty of new knowledge about seismic activity and, more to the point, new assessments about earthquakes. Entergy, the plant's owner, is seeking permits to extend operations of Reactors 2 and 3 to 2035.

With Japan's Fukushima reactors continuing to spew radiation weeks after being crippled by an earthquake and tsunami, the gaps in the U.S. review seem glaringly obvious.

"To make administrative decisions that ignore new information is unacceptable," as Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory geophysicist Klaus Jacob, an expert on risk assessment, told the Editorial Board during an Editorial Spotlight interview last week.

State Attorney Gen. Eric Schneiderman has called for more stringent and comprehensive relicensing reviews. U.S. Reps. Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey, both New York Democrats, have introduced legislation, the Nuclear Power Licensing Reform Act, that would require the NRC to evaluate relicensing applications as stringently as the agency does for new plants, which would include evaluating the latest seismic data.

It's time for Congress to require the NRC to develop a review that includes the better science and smarter safety measures that we've learned since the plants opened some 35 years ago.

www.lohud.com

THE TIMES UNION of Albany, April 5, on Republican efforts to restrict the power of the federal Environmental Protection Agency:

Today's question is for U.S. Rep. Pete Olson, R-Texas, who fancies himself as the author of a compromise in the battle in Congress over the Environmental Protection Agency. How much money will it cost, Mr. Olson, to fully calculate the price of environmental regulation?

Nothing is free and little comes cheap. Mr. Olson needs to remember that as he calls for adding to a regulatory burden that already includes cost analyses. His call for a calculation of how many jobs a given regulation might eliminate, as he seems to fear, or else create might even require hiring more scientists and economic analysts.

Think of the mischief that could bring about. Someone else in Congress might demand to know how much it costs to find out how much it costs for the EPA to do its job.

One might think that some 40 years after the EPA was created, its role in making sure the air we breathe and the water we drink are clean and free of pollutants would be accepted. One might think that critics of government would focus their attention on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- if not Libya, too. That, or, say, what's still the scant success of the Obama administration in creating jobs.

No, alas. It's the EPA that has some people -- Mr. Olson included -- so occupied, to the point where they want to restrict its power before they vote to provide the money to keep the federal government functioning for the rest of the fiscal year.

Some House Republicans' idea of the EPA is an agency banned from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Their idea of enforcing clean air rules for oil refineries is to repeal them. That's because laws now on the books reasonably require power plants and oil refineries to use the best technology available to limit the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Then there's Mr. Olson's plan. That it's not quite as radical as those other attempts to disarm the EPA hardly makes it a wise or practical compromise. Mr. Olson's motives are suspect, frankly. Just last month, he was telling Gina McCarthy, the EPA's top air official, that the EPA routinely abuses its regulatory authority.

Some, like Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus might even label the various calls in Congress to redefine the EPA's mission a series of "false choices."

Those out to bleed the EPA, finally, might be taken aback by the findings of the financial analysis that Mr. Olson wants to impose. For example, an assessment of the impact of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, already mandated by law, found that such regulations prevented some 13 million lost workdays in 2010.

All those sick days add up to a lot of jobs saved -- not to mention precluding 160,000 premature deaths, 130,000 heart attacks and 1.7 million asthma attacks, according to the agency's calculations. Come 2020, the EPA says, those laws will prevent an additional 13 million lost workdays, along with 160,000 premature deaths, 130,000 heart attacks and 1.7 million asthma attacks.

Why, Mr. Olson, would other EPA regulations be so different? Would they reveal an abuse of authority?

www.timesunion.com