Spitzer To Seek Tuition Deduction on the Rebound

Governor Spitzer is aiming to rebound after a grueling budget battle, with plans under way to consolidate local government, to announce a commission on public higher education, and to push legislation — including his proposed $1,000 private school tuition tax deduction — that was excluded from the final budget.

The Spitzer administration is looking forward to resuming the governor's role as unfettered state executive after spending time as one man in a crowded negotiating room with a deadline hanging over his head.

The passage of the budget gives the administration some breathing room to allow newly staffed agencies to carry out policy directives that were put on hold during the months-long budget process, which ended during the weekend.

"Immediately, the staff is going to begin advancing an agenda … that has been partially consumed by budget negotiations," a spokeswoman for the governor, Christine Anderson, said. "There's no break. It keeps going."

The centerpiece of the governor's agenda over the next several weeks is a rollout of the administration's plan to consolidate New York's sprawling local government, a decades-old problem for the Empire State that is one of the reasons New Yorkers pay higher local taxes than other Americans.

In his State of the State address, Mr. Spitzer said New York must "consolidate New York's multiple layers of local government — those 4,200 taxing jurisdictions that cost taxpayers millions each year in duplicative services and stand as yet another impediment to change."

Mr. Spitzer's special adviser and good friend, Lloyd Constantine, is in charge of the effort and has been in talks with counties about combining or dissolving towns and villages, merging or eliminating services, departments, and positions, and sharing buildings and equipment. The plans could have an impact on everything from trash collection to school busing to property tax rates.

Next to reorganizing the bureaucracy of Medicaid, Mr. Spitzer's efforts to consolidate local government could be his most important first-term strategy to lower public costs. Because the plan is outside the budget process, Mr. Spitzer will likely have more control over its outcome.

Administration officials say Mr. Spitzer is intent on picking up pieces of his executive budget that wound up on the cutting-room floor during negotiations with Senate and Assembly leaders.

Ms. Anderson said Mr. Spitzer would renew a push for a bill that would give families a $1,000-per-child tax deduction — worth on average $50 to $80 — to offset costs of private and parochial school tuition.

The measure was strongly backed by Edward Cardinal Egan, who came to Albany last month to urge its passage, arguing that parochial and private schools save the state money by educating hundreds of thousands of children. "It is not a whole lot," Mr. Egan said during his visit, the Associated Press reported. "But it is at least a statement of a beginning toward what is clearly justice."

Teachers unions are opposed to the tax deduction, saying its approval would put the state on a slippery slope toward tuition vouchers, siphoning state funds from the unionized public school system.

Administration officials say the governor will also try to breathe life back into his proposed expansion of the state Bottle Bill that would add nickel deposits to noncarbonated beverages and would require beverage companies to direct unclaimed deposits to the state's Environmental Protection Fund.

A number of Republican lawmakers have said the expanded bottle bill is essentially a tax on the companies.

The administration predicted that the deposits would annually add $100 million to state coffers and had factored the savings into its revenue forecasts. With the final budget adding another $1 billion to next year's deficit, Mr. Spitzer is under pressure to come up with ways to close the increasing gap.

Mr. Spitzer is also preparing to announce a public higher education commission that will advise the administration on a new tuition policy for the State University of New York and the City University of New York and design benchmarks for comparing SUNY and CUNY to peer public institutions across the nation.

During his campaign, Mr. Spitzer pledged to transform the SUNY system, whose reputation he said didn't match up against other public university systems.

Ms. Anderson said Mr. Spitzer would eventually propose a bill legalizing gay marriage but the measure is not one of his immediate post-budget agenda priorities.