Exhausted from last week’s marathon all-nighter, Albany legislators have slowed a bit in budget negotiations. Despite reports that the budget might pass a week before the April 1 deadline, it’s now clear that negotiations will stretch into next week. It’s not for lack of effort, though—Albany has been hard at work:

• At yesterday’s Joint Budget Conference Subcommittee meeting on transportation, Senator Charles Fuschillo (R-Merrick) and Assemblyman David Gantt (D-Rochester) said that budget negotiations are proceeding well. Sticking points appear to include funding for the MTA’s Capital Program and operating funds for upstate transit systems. Senator Michael Nozzolio (R-Fayette) spoke emphatically about the need to redistribute the corporate and utilities tax statewide in order to “ensure the integrity of upstate systems, which are run on a shoestring.”

• The Empire State Transportation Alliance (ESTA), a broad coalition of business, civic, and labor groups of which Tri-State is a member, met with senators and their staffs about the aforementioned MTA Capital Program funds, which were absent from the Senate’s budget resolution. Specifically, ESTA asked for the approval of a $7 billion raise to the MTA’s bond cap and a $770 million contribution to the MTA’s Capital Program.

• The Senate Transportation Committee passed a bill, S6536/A9455, that would give riders a non-voting representative on the board of the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, Buffalo’s troubled transit provider. The New York State Transportation Equity Alliance (NYSTEA), of which Tri-State is a steering committee member, is calling for rider representatives on transit authority boards statewide, but the group feels that a voting seat would more significantly impact transit decisions.

• In Albany’s most recent attack on the MTA’s constantly threatened dedicated transit funding, a bill that would exempt libraries from the payroll mobility tax, S6079A/A8868, passed out of the Senate Finance Committee. The fiscal blow to the MTA was estimated to be $1.3 million. Although Senator Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan) voted in favor of the bill, she voiced concerns about its impact during the committee meeting: “for the record, this house has shown little understanding of the need for transit access across the state.”