Spirit of Earth Day lost; plenty of trash remains in Albany
BRIAN ACKLEY Political Columnist
This past Sunday was celebrated as Earth Day, a chance for the socially conscious to scour parks, beaches and roadsides for beer bottles, syringes and hamburger wrappers.

It gets, deservedly so, oodles of feel-good media coverage. Big black trash bags flap in the breeze as kids excitedly rush from one pile of garbage to another in an effort to make New York State a better place to live.

This past Monday represented another day of "celebration," one also designed to collect and carry to the curb more big black bags of garbage. A day designed to clean out a cornucopia of compost which continues its uninterrupted rot. A day to kick to the curb the rubble and rubbish of decades of neglect.

There was comparatively scant media coverage, however, and few bothered to make any serious effort to drain the long stewing cesspool of swill. Monday, in case you didn't know, was the 2007 Reform New York Day of Action, the third annual such observance, no less. Perhaps it should be renamed Moving Heaven and Earth Day instead.

Front and center, naturally, was Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who talks a good reform game but who has so far repeatedly stumbled when it comes to the walk, as the state's recent budget process confirmed. The state's new CEO is fond of saying meaningful change is like turning the Titanic in a bathtub. Problem is, even Spitzer is yet to see the iceberg, much less call for full engine reverse, despite whatever political claims of meaningful change might exist.

There is one bottom line which everyone can understand, a one-year budget spending increase of 9 percent, approved a few weeks ago by Spitzer and his legislative enablers. That despite the fact that everyone in Albany knows, including the guy who sweeps the legislative chamber floors, that New York's looming deficits are circling like buzzards over a landfill.

In fact, Albany's own budget monitoring office figures our deficit at more than $3 billion next year and a robust $7.3 billion in 2010 unless someone caps the craziness.

And the budget process was as transparent, yet again, as used coffee grounds. Lawmakers might as well have been voting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence legislation as budget bills. "As we voted on them, they were still warm," Assemblyman Toby Stavisky told the Queens Ledger recently. Spitzer's budget hammer, as it turned out, was made of memory foam, reinforcing and not reforming the painful processes of the past.

Also released last week was a listing of those dastardly little legislative member items, as if that somehow was a major reform step. The true issue isn't the money itself - lawmakers are generally smart enough to funnel those millions to groups and organizations that are individually hard to rail against - but the breakdown of just who brazenly takes what is what should make the body politic bristle.

Take the Democratically controlled Assembly, where Speaker Shelly Silver commandeered some $7.5 million to sprinkle among his constituents. Assembly Minority Leader James Tedesco's cut of the same pie? Try $544,000. In fact, of the $85 million in member items, Democrats took $80 million, Republicans $5 million. Although the final financial breakdown hasn't gone public yet, in the Republican controlled Senate, GOPers grabbed almost 3,200 of the 4,440 listed items.

Spoils are one thing, but ballot box blackmail is another. In New York, to the victor go the votes.

And while Spitzer now wants to target campaign finance reform - despite the fact unions and political parties employ people just to find more loopholes regardless of what such efforts might bring - a true reformer would find a way to stop the grotesque gerrymandering that every election season keeps the 212 piles of mostly dysfunctional debris under the rug.

Our capital is a lot like waterfront development, so glacial is the progress and transformation of both. The garbage piled up on each are eyesores waiting for action. And Albany, like our waterfront, is still most notable for its filth. Time to make every day Earth Day in New York. Time to get serious about taking out the trash.

(Brian Ackley is a columnist for the Weekly Independent Newspapers of Western New York. Opinions expressed are those of the author.)