As an appeals court prepares to hear the case of the Bloomberg Bonds, by means of which the mayor hopes to turn over billions of dollars in city debt to an obscure state entity, the spin is starting over Attorney General Spitzer’s recent remarks about the lax accounting of public authorities. The left wing of this debate wants you to believe that the problem with the state’s public authorities — like the Empire State Development Corp. and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — is excessive access to Albany by lobbyists exercising their right to petition the government under the First Amendment. But the real problem with the authorities is the government’s refusal to rein in its spending while fobbing off enormous obligations onto these Enron-type, off-the-balance sheet schemes.

In the dodge Mr. Bloomberg wants, the city would get out of five $500 million payments, totaling $2.5 billion, by having the state Legislature place the debt with the Local Government Assistance Corporation, a state authority. LGAC — or, more precisely, the state’s taxpayers — would then be liable for $170 million payments every year for 30 years, a total of $5.1 billion. It’s enough to make one sympathize with Mr. Spitzer’s saying to the Association for a Better New York, as he did on September 16, that, “The public authorities are becoming to New York’s government what off-balance-sheet partnerships were to Enron.” While Mr. Spitzer was not referring to the Bloomberg bond deal in his remarks, moving billions of dollars of debt from the city to what the Manhattan Institute’s fiscal policy expert, E.J. McMahon, called “a letterhead with a board” is just the kind of maneuver that ought to raise Enron-type questions.

Where we would depart with Mr. Spitzer, however, is in his efforts to make it sound as if this problem with the public authorities is a new thing and that the situation has become significantly worse under Governor Pataki’s watch. Governors Rockefeller through Cuomo have been guilty of abusing these entities previously, and Mr. Pataki, while no innocent, has made no particular innovations in this arena. He, as previous governors, has used the public authorities to contract state debt with far greater latitude than the state’s constitution affords him.

The state constitution is exquisitely clear on the subject of borrowing, and sets a high bar for the state to take on debt. Article 7, Section 11 says: “[N]o debt shall be hereafter contracted by or in behalf of the state, unless such debt shall be authorized by law, for some single work or purpose, to be distinctly specified therein. No such law shall take effect until it shall, at a general election, have received a majority of all votes cast for and against it at such election.” The purpose here is clearly to prevent the people of New York from being saddled with massive debts in the absence of a democratic decision to take on such burdens.

However, the protections afforded the state’s taxpayers under the New York State constitution have fallen by the wayside. The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, has allowed the Legislature and the governor to appropriate long-term debts on a yearly basis, making them technically year-to-year obligations — even though the state realistically has no choice but to appropriate debt payments, lest it ruin its credit rating. It has gotten to the point where only about $4 billion of our state’s $40 billion in directly state-supported debt — plus another $60 billion in debt issued by state agencies — has ever been voted on by the people of New York. The last bond issue to go before voters was for schools in 1997, and it lost.

Of course, skirting the will of the people is just what Mr. Bloomberg and his legislative accomplices have in mind. The mayor has complained publicly that alternate proposals from the governor to help the city with its debt were “not guaranteed, so we’d have to go back to the Legislature every year.… The city could be left on the hook.” Thus, in at least one way, Mr. Bloomberg’s actions are different from those of Enron: No one was forced to invest in Enron. Not so for taxpayers of the city and state of New York.