Here is a story that turns familiar political categories on their heads a little: downstate social-services advocates demanding a budget CUT that upstate Republicans are resisting.
Children’s advocates who favor funding alternative programs with state money that they say is now wasted on a half-dozen juvenile residential facilities expressed anger today at word that new Gov. David Paterson had “sold them out,” as a source put it, in budget talks with the state Senate.
Such complaints come and go. But what’s unusual about this development is that the Spitzer-Paterson administration itself – as represented by the state’s Office of Children & Family Services – called for closing the underutilized residential facililties, as the office phrased it, “as part of an ongoing restructuring to significantly improve services to troubled children.”
Whatever the merits, however, upstate representatives want to retain the jobs that juvenile jails, prisons and other correction facilities put in their districts, whether the residents are downstaters or not.
Yes, sometimes even Republicans will endorse Kremlin-style socialism -- if it means local employment.
The intended closings had been announced by the office's commissioner, Gladys Carrion (above).
A few minutes ago, as word spread ...
Dan Janison
.....that GOP-controlled Senate at least partially got its way – details reamain elusive as the budget gets settled today in Albany – Mishi Faruquee, director of the juvenile justice project of the non-profit Correctional Association of New York, told us:
“It looks like there is some agreement to keep open some of these facilities. We think that, given the budget deficit and given the cuts being made to services, it’s unconscionable that the legislature and governor would keep open facilities that have been proven not to work. If anything was a no-brainer that needed to be cut from the budget, this was it.”
Here is a succinct backgrounder on the issue from the Times' Jim Dwyer, published last week.
The rest of the story, of course, may well involve differing views of law-enforcement philosophy. But when public jobs are at stake, every legislator wants them to be in his district. And when a new executive is establishing himself at the negotiating table, something from his presume base always seems to give.