ALBANY – During the fall elections, it seemed as if every candidate for the state Legislature was promising to fix Albany. Republicans and Democrats, incumbents and challengers – practically all of them rolled out plans to make state government more open, democratic, and responsible.

After Election Day, the legislative leadership declared that they had gotten the message, loud and clear, and were ready to turn a new leaf.

To judge by this week’s session, however, they’ve already fallen off the wagon. In a two-day burst of politicking, Governor Pataki and the Legislature went back to many of the bad habits deplored by watchdog groups.

Huddling behind closed doors, Mr. Pataki and the leaders of the Assembly and Senate negotiated complex deals on two long-standing issues – overhauling the penalties for drug crimes and expanding the Javits Convention Center – then rushed them to the floor for approval. Rank-and-file lawmakers barely had time to glance through the bills before voting. There was no question of vetting the legislation in committee, holding public hearings, offering amendments, or thoroughly debating the details.

Then there is the question of substance. The state faces a $6 billion budget deficit in the next fiscal year, a court order demanding significantly more money for public schools, soaring health-care expenses, and a big hole in the budget of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. New York also has the highest tax burden and per capita debt load of any state.

Yet lawmakers did not hesitate to approve a Javits Center bill that commits future taxpayers to repay another $1.55 billion in loans and levies a new tax on New York City hotels of $1.50 a day for each guest.

It was, in short, as if the fix Albany movement had never happened.

“The Capitol building was seized with temporary amnesia,” the legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, Blair Horner, said. “They seemed to have forgotten about the need for reform, and were back to their old tricks of midnight deals [and] spending borrowed money.”

“The outrage goes on,” a budget analyst at the Manhattan Institute, E.J. McMahon, said. “They just don’t get it. They’re operating in a universe of their own. … There essentially is no fiscal discipline to speak of in that place.”

“The big issue is, did the pre-election rhetoric match the post-election reality?” the legislative director of the League of Women Voters of New York State, Barbara Bartoletti, said. “No it didn’t.”

Lawmakers could at least claim that they had finally settled issues that had stymied them for years. The Rockefeller-era drug laws, in particular, had long been recognized by members of both parties as unnecessarily harsh. People convicted of first-time nonviolent drug crimes can theoretically spend the rest of their lives in prison. The governor and legislative leaders had separately committed themselves to reforming the laws long ago, but their efforts to compromise repeatedly broke down.

Yet on another issue that government watchdogs had identified as a priority – ending a 20-year streak of late budgets – the paralysis continues.

Last month, Governor Pataki vetoed a package of changes in the budget process that both houses of the Legislature had approved unanimously earlier this year. Among other things, it calls for pushing back the start of the fiscal year by one month, to May 1; automatically imposing a contingency budget based on the previous year’s spending if lawmakers miss that deadline, and setting up an “independent budget office,” appointed by legislative leaders, to referee disputes over spending and revenue forecasts.

Mr. Bruno essentially promised to override that veto this week unless he could reach a compromise with the governor. When push came to shove, however, Mr. Bruno did not put the override motion on the floor.

Mr. Bruno explained yesterday that he was reluctant to rebuke Mr. Pataki on that issue when they were making progress on other fronts.

“If you’re in a confrontational mode it’s kind of hard to negotiate and compromise,” he said.

He alsol noted that the Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, had been unwilling to consider an override this week. The problem appears to have been that too many of his Democratic members were absent on Tuesday for Mr. Silver to guarantee a two-thirds majority.

The bill to expand the Javits Center, on Manhattan’s West Side, offers a lot of fodder for Albany critics.

To begin with, some critics question whether the expanded facility will be viable given the many taxpayer-financed convention centers it will be competing with in other cities. Those concerns were drowned out by the debate over the proposal to build a Jets football stadium adjacent to the Javits Center, an issue that is unresolved. Most lawmakers accepted the claim from the Bloomberg administration and business leaders that the convention facility will attract hundreds of millions of dollars in additional tourism to the city, generating enough tax revenues to pay for itself.

“Around the country independent experts are saying these things are a bad deal,” a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Steven Malanga, said. “In New York, not one legislator I know of stood up and said, ‘Gee, maybe we should bring one of these experts in here.'”

He notes that the state plans to pay part of the cost of building a hotel at the center. “Why do we have to be subsidizing hotels in New York City?” Mr. Malanga said. “If the private sector won’t do it, what kind of a bet is it?

The Javits legislation also relies on $1.5 billion in so-called backdoor borrowing. Rather than seeking the permission of voters to incur debt – as a plain-language reading of the constitution requires – lawmakers will obtain their loans through various quasi-independent authorities, a dodge pioneered by Governor Rockefeller that is now an Albany routine. Technically, such borrowing is not considered debt of the state, but taxpayers pay it back just the same.

In addition to borrowing $1.2 billion for expansion of the convention center on Manhattan’s West Side, the bill also borrows $350 million for unidentified economic development projects outside New York City. Mr. Bruno insisted on that concession on behalf of his Republican members, who primarily represent the suburbs and rural areas of the state.

“The most solid way to create revenue in this state is to create jobs – by expanding business, by investing in the economy,” he said yesterday.

The only senator to vote against the Javits expansion was Liz Krueger of Manhattan, a Democrat who has been agitating for changing the way state government does business. She called the bill “symbolic of all the things we still do wrong in Albany.”

“I do support the need to expand our convention center,” Ms. Krueger said. “But do I need it at $1.55 billion? I don’t know. Do I need it as much as I need better schools and an improved public transportation system? I think we should discuss that in the context of the budget.”

Yesterday, Mr. Bruno insisted that his house is moving ahead with reform. He said he still hopes to work out a compromise on the budget overhaul with Mr. Pataki and the Assembly before the end of the calendar year. And he promised to enact changes in the procedural rules of the Senate when it reconvenes in January.

“The bottom line is to be more efficient, more open, more public, more responsive, and more democratic – small d – in the process,” he said.

Yet he made no apologies for the closed and undemocratic process that he and his colleagues followed this week.

“There’s a lot of criticism out there in this world of ours about gridlock,” Mr. Bruno said. “It was time for us to change all that.”