Paterson’s Pictures
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The other papers in town have been writing about the lawsuit by a white man who says he was fired by David Paterson as the staff photographer for the state Senate minority. The question that hasn’t been asked until our Russell Berman got on the case was what in the world the state Senate minority — 29 members — is doing with its own $48,000 a year staff photographer in the first place. What a waste of taxpayer money. And that’s just the beginning of it. It turns out that as Senate minority leader, Mr. Paterson, who has since been promoted to lieutenant governor, oversaw an empire of 143 employees, more than five times the number that Senator McConnell uses to run the minority leader’s office of the United States Senate in Washington.
Mr. Berman’s reporting found that overall, the New York State Assembly and Senate totaled 3,428 staff members during its busiest period in 2003, the most recent year for which the National Conference of State Legislatures has employment data. That number is nearly 500 more than the second highest state, Pennsylvania, and it’s more than 45% more than either California or Texas, the two most populous states in the union.
If all these staffers and their bosses were performing well for the state’s residents there wouldn’t be much complaining about it. But the legislature in Albany has been termed the most dysfunctional in America by the Brennan Center at NYU. It has produced a state that residents are fleeing in droves, one of the nation’s highest tax burdens, and an upstate economy that Governor Spitzer has likened to Appalachia. Instead of fixing the problems, our politicians are taking pictures of themselves — on the taxpayers’ dime.
We’re less interesting in bickering over the race of the photographer than in why the Democrats in the Senate need a staff photographer in the first place. Can’t the Democrats and Republicans share a photographer, as senators in Florida do, and save the taxpayers the cost of a salaried job? For all the government spending on photography, what emerges from Mr. Berman’s reporting is not a pretty picture.
