The court order yesterday barring Mayor Bloomberg from executing his plan to stretch out the city’s debt from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s for 30 more years may be temporary, but it’s a good first step for the taxpayers of 2034. While few alive then will likely to remember the struggle underway between Mr. Bloomberg and Governor Pataki over a scheme to transfer city debt to the state — at a cost $170 million a year, or $5.1 billion total — New York’s future fiscal fecundity rests in part on the current legal wrangling. And the chance is at hand to address years of abuse by the Legislature in Albany of its power to issue bonds.

In the budget that the Legislature approved this spring over Mr. Pataki’s veto, a deal was cut to “bail out” New York City. One part of that deal was for the state to authorize the city to raise taxes on itself. The other part was for the state to begin making yearly payments to the city so that it could refinance its debt under the Municipal Assistance Corporation for New York — an entity that was set up to bail the city out back in 1975, under Mayor Lindsay, the last time we underwent a serious fiscal crisis. The deal would leave Mr. Lindsay’s great-grandchildren paying off his debt, but that hasn’t stopped Mr. Bloomberg, Speaker Gifford Miller, and the city’s comptroller, William Thompson, from supporting the deal, which gives the city $500 million more to spend every year in the short term.

What no one involved in the deal seems to have counted on, however, is Mr. Pataki’s determination to fight the plan. The state’s comptroller, Alan Hevesi, has been no slouch either. The men, a Republican and a Democrat, joined together to instruct the Local Government Assistance Corporation, responsible for releasing the $170 mil lion a year, not to release the money. Yesterday the LGAC went to court to stop Mr. Bloomberg from plunging ahead and issuing the bonds in defiance of the governor.

The brief filed on behalf of LGAC yesterday, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York in Albany County, lays out in detail the case that the bond deal violates the state constitution. The key issue is that the Legislature attempted to skirt a requirement that a multi-year obligation, such as a 30-year bond deal, must be subject to the appropriation process every year. Otherwise, according to the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, such an obligation would have to be approved directly by voters in a general election. This is to prevent the people of New York from being saddled without massive debts in the absence of a democratic decision to take on such burdens.

Even the Court of Appeals’ standard, however, seems more liberal than the actual language of the New York State Constitution. 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 the votes cast for and against it at such election.” The meaning sounds plain enough.

However, as the Manhattan Institute’s fiscal policy expert, E.J. McMahon, put it, Albany has long been “circumventing the letter and spirit of the constitution.”By appropriating long-term debts on a yearly basis, legislators have prevented long-term debt from being considered legally anything other than a year-to-year obligation. At the same time, the state has been making use of various state entities, such as the Empire State Development Corporation, to contract debt on behalf of the state — all the while skirting the relevant provisions of the state constitution.”There’s the constitution as it’s written, and there’s the constitution as it’s applied,” said Mr. McMahon. “The state’s highest court has upheld what they do.”

It has gotten to the point that despite the clear intent of the framers of the state constitution to keep New Yorkers firmly in control of their debt load, 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, according to Mr. McMahon. The last bond issue put before the voters was in 1997, for a school bond, and it lost. Of course, skirting the will of the people is exactly what Mr. Bloomberg and his friends have in mind. The brief quotes a New York Sun report of August 11, where the mayor complained that an alternate proposal from the governor “is not guaranteed, so we’d have to go back to the Legislature every year.…The city could be left on the hook.”

The bond plan’s backers clearly know they’re in trouble on the constitutional question. Before the Legislature adjourned this summer, a “clean up” bill was proposed that would have made the bonds subject to annual appropriations. Nothing was passed, however, and nothing is likely to pass now that the public spotlight is shining on these shenanigans. Mr. Bloomberg may not want to see the city “on the hook,” but it is his refusal to rein in spending that has put it there. If the mayor gets his way, all of New York will be on the hook. The courts could take this chance to reassert the plain meaning of the text of our state’s foundational document.