Governor Hits ‘A Wall' With Legislature

ALBANY — Governor Spitzer's battle with lawmakers is quickly spreading to issues beyond the dispute over picking a comptroller.

Legislative leaders have broken off talks with the governor on three key goals of his first term: lowering workers' compensation costs, imposing stricter campaign finance laws, and passing a civil confinement bill for sex offenders, a Spitzer administration official told The New York Sun.

"Bottom line, they've hit a wall," a spokesman for the governor said. "We were having discussions, and then nobody wanted to move."

The spokesman said negotiations broke down last week, as lawmakers were preparing to rebuff the governor's demand that they pick a comptroller recommended by a special screening panel. Instead, to the governor's dismay, they installed as comptroller a Democratic assemblyman, Thomas DiNapoli, who will serve almost a four-year term as the state's chief fiscal officer in charge of the $145 billion pension fund.

A furious Mr. Spitzer then delivered a broadside against the Legislature, saying lawmakers showed a "stunning lack of integrity" in the choice of Mr. DiNapoli, whom Mr. Spitzer said was unqualified for the job.

The spokesman suggested the Legislature could repair its relationship with the governor by hammering out deals on the three agenda items, which were each given prominent treatment in the governor's State of the State address last month. "You can have worst possible year, but the way to redeem it all is to have the lawmakers come forward and do things that are undone," the official said. Aides to the Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, denied that talks had stalled. But the rift between lawmakers and the governor appeared to widen yesterday, as both Mr. Spitzer and lawmakers intensified their rhetoric. At a thank-you breakfast for campaign donors at the Grand Hyatt yesterday morning, Mr. Spitzer, still stinging from the comptroller vote, hinted of payback to come. "The knock-out punch is coming very soon," he said, according to a person who attended the event. Later, on a tour in Syracuse to promote his budget, Mr. Spitzer scornfully dismissed a local lawmaker who voted for Mr. DiNapoli.

"Bill Magnarelli is one of those unfortunate Assembly members who just raises his hand when he's told to do so, and didn't ever stand up and say, ‘Whose interest am I representing?'" Mr. Spitzer said, according to a report on the Post-Standard Web site. New York magazine reported that Mr. Spitzer has decided to boycott the annual dinner of Mr. Silver's Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee at the Grand Hyatt, where the governor was supposed to be honored. While he risks further alienating a fractious Legislature, Mr. Spitzer is gambling that his strategy of confrontation and public shaming will pay off in the long run.

The administration is wagering that an aggressive tone will strike a chord with the public and ultimately compel lawmakers to yield to his demands regarding the budget as well as campaign finance, workers' compensation, and civil confinement.

Messrs. Silver and Bruno, who have survived at the top of the Legislature for more than 12 years, have proved to be immune to their historically low approval ratings, which now hover at 20%. The Spitzer administration believes the governor can take advantage of the public's relative low opinion of the Legislature by using it as an opportunity to influence legislative races and even topple incumbents. A strategy of leveraging public opinion stands in contrast to the approach toward negotiations favored by Governor Pataki, who often reached deals with his legislative adversaries by bargaining over a set of unrelated issues. The most famous example is when lawmakers in 1998 gave their consent to establishing 100 charter schools after Mr. Pataki awarded them a pay raise.

"You would presume — and it's only a presumption — that they would be more inclined to move forward with reform initiatives if they're being portrayed rightfully or not as obstacles to reform," the spokesman said. "In the past there has been a lot of horse-trading or arm-twisting. Eliot doesn't believe in doing that kind of stuff. Instead, he believes in taking the case to the people, which is what he does best."

The strategy is being put to a test as lawmakers consider a raft of measures put forward by the governor. Mr. Spitzer in his State of the State said he would "replace the weakest campaign finance laws in the nation with the strongest," calling for significantly lower contribution limits and closure of finance loopholes.

He also proposed changes to business regulations, saying he would seek alterations to workers' compensation laws that would lower employer premiums while increasing benefits. New York businesses pay among the highest workers' compensation rates in the nation, primarily because the state requires lifetime payments in cases of permanent-partial disability, a category of injury that includes lower-back strain.

Mr. Spitzer also wants the Legislature to agree on civil confinement legislation that would allow the state to lock up certain dangerous sex offenders after they complete their prison sentences. Mr. Pataki last year failed to get lawmakers to agree on a civil confinement bill that satisfied Republicans and Democrats, which disagreed on the process for confining sex offenders to a mental facility.