Less than a month hence voters in New York will have the chance to send a message to Albany that they can’t be taken for granted on the budget – by voting no on Propositon 1. We first wrote about this idea on November 10 of last year in an editorial called A Parody of Reform. The measure is a power-grab by the legislature to take away the governor’s budget authority. As the vote nears, let it be marked, once and for all, that the problem with the state budget is not the process but the budgeters.

Proposal 1 purports to solve a problem that isn’t really a problem – the legislature’s perennial inability to pass budgets on time. For all but one of the past 21 years, lawmakers have failed to wrap up the budget before the start of the new fiscal year. Yet the timing of the budget causes significantly less mischief than the contents. In 2003, the legislature concluded the process by overriding the governor’s veto more than a month after the start of the fiscal year, certainly not the longest the state has gone without a final budget.

New Yorkers were hurt more by the record tax increases approved in that budget than by its late timing. This year, even as their leaders argued that New York needs a constitutional amendment to fix this “problem,” legislators handed in the budget on schedule. Yet we’re still looking for any evidence that getting the budget in before April 1 eased the tax burden on New Yorkers or brought spending under control.

Albany’s real failing is its inability to craft good budgets, not lawmakers’ refusal to enact prompt budgets. Proposal 1 would only make this problem worse. Current law hasn’t led to fiscal responsibility, but it at least provides a traffic cop, in the governor, who sets the parameters for budget discussions. Under Proposal 1, no one would set any parameters. The director of the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy, Edmund J. McMahon, notes that right now the governor’s executive budget proposal and its accompanying reports are the most transparent spending documents in Albany each year, while the legislature’s eventual budget bill is generally the most inscrutable.

Lawmakers no longer even specify individual pork projects in their version of the budget, opting instead to tack on omnibus budget lines and let the details seep out over the course of months. Whatever the solution to this ill may be, it doesn’t involve vesting more power in the hands of a legislature that can’t responsibly exercise what power it has already.

Proposition 1 would also move the start of the fiscal year to May 1 from April 1. In one sense it’s apt, moving the date to a day celebrated by communists from one marked by fools. It would, however, create a constant cash crunch, since there is no provision in the amendment or its enacting statute to harmonize the schedules for items like school aid payments or tax receipts and refunds. “Reform” would require a complex new network of reserve funds to allow the government to function on the new calendar.

Supporters of Proposal 1 – including Common Cause New York, the New York Public Interest Research Group, and the League of Women Voters of New York State, who joined forces to publish a 23-page defense of the ballot item last month – are correct that something has gone wrong with the state budget. New Yorkers would be well served by some provisions that would be triggered by passage of Proposal 1. The new law would bring permanently “on budget” the Health Care Reform Act that for has allowed billions of dollars of spending to happen outside the normal budgeting process, and thus out of public sight. In 2005, for the first time, Governor Pataki voluntarily included this health spending in his budget proposal.

But this reform and others, like the creation of an Independent Budget Office to analyze spending proposals, could be achieved without the constitutional amendment on which voters will decide in November. So a single awkward question remains about the amendment itself: If legislators didn’t have the political will to enact these reforms before, why should New Yorkers trust them with an even greater say in the budgeting process?

New Yorkers pay the highest state taxes in the country, forking over billions more each year than neighboring states for the same level of services. While the current system of strong executive control has not led to enough spending and borrowing restraint, voters have little reason to think that giving the legislature more authority would be any better. Other procedural changes haven’t fixed the budget mess, including a 1999 provision withholding legislators’ pay until they pass a budget if they run past the April deadline. A real vote for fiscal responsibility is a vote for a responsible legislator, not a vote for Proposal 1.