The Syracuse Post-Standard continues its series of articles on the Governor's, Senate's, and Assembly's borrowed slush fund money, concluding with a list of 1720 recipients since 1997. Highlights include:
The lists of recipients are broken down by region, and Tompkins County is unsurprisingly in the Finger Lakes Region. Cornell University got $25,000,000 (of $30,245,000 total for the county) in a single grant, along with $2.8 million in a variety of other grants. In Dryden, TC3 got $75,000, and the Willow Glen Cemetery Association got $80,000.
I've called Cornell and TC3 for more information about where the money went, but it may take them a while to respond. I was happy to call the Willow Glen Cemetery Association and get a straight answer from Brad Perkins, their president:
"the money was applied for to compensate the cemetery for relocating 47 graves and reconstructing that part of the cemetery because the DOT was moving a road on the west side of the cemetery."
(I'll have more on what's happening at the cemetery in a future article.)
My suspicion is that most of the money went to good causes, probably in large part to projects that fell through the usual funding cracks. The problem, of course, isn't with what the money was spent on, but rather where it came from: bonds issued by authorities to avoid state borrowing rules, and administered by the leaders of the Senate and Assembly, or the governor.
Posted by simonstl at October 19, 2004 12:17 PM