My first speech as governor described two basic ideas that are still at the heart of my beliefs — government’s necessary and proper role in doing what we cannot do for ourselves individually, which I called “progressive pragmatism,” and the idea of society as a family. I was surprised by a much more favorable response than I had anticipated, including a letter of praise from former president Richard Nixon. I was not surprised when the Reagan administration continued to advance their policy of social Darwinism, propounding a new ethic in place of the idea of government as family: “God helps those whom God had helped, and if He has left you out who are we to presume on His judgment?”
-Mario Cuomo More than Words, The Speeches of Mario Cuomo, 1993
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Lt. Governor Alfred DelBello: This joint session will come to order, pursuant to resolution duly adopted by each of the houses of the legislature, the Senate and Assembly of the state of New York are met in joint session for the purpose of receiving the annual message to the legislature from the governor of the state of New York. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you the new governor of the state of New York, Governor Mario M. Cuomo.
Governor Mario M. Cuomo: Thank you very much.
In the past decade, we've become accustomed to the litany of hard times, Recession, budget gaps and cutbacks. Nothing would please me more today than to be able to tell you that those times are over. I cannot. This year we face a state budget gap of enormous proportions and given our present rate of spending and the crippled national economy, next year's gap will be the largest in our history. There is no way around the certain hard fact of this deficit, of the sacrifices that it will require or the common resolve that it will demand. For us to succeed now, each of us must be committed to the degree of cooperation and compromise that John Kennedy described as the courageous art of conciliation.
I begin then by asking you, the legislature, for your help. I ask it openly, sincerely, simply.
And in return, I make a simple promise. I will work as hard as I know how and we'll deal with you without charade or deceit or unreasonable expectation. And so will everyone who works with me. But our total mutual effort is demanded by the times is beyond question. At the same time that we face an enormous budget gap, there are thousands of unemployed in this state who cannot retrain themselves. Thousands of poorly nourished infants who cannot feed themselves. Thousands of elderly who cannot protect themselves. And they will not be fed or sheltered by our excuses or our delay. Their welfare waits on our joint effort.
What is required then is a great deal that would be strong enough to do things, even if they do not produce immediate political benefit, that we draw fully on our resources without punishing private enterprise or destroying initiative. That we act not as a half hitch of interest groups and factions, but as a family, as the family of New York. We're required to do more with less, to marry the drive and sheer energy of the private sector to public purposes, to build in New York, to buy in New York, to believe in New York. As governor, I will carry our case to the nation for the help that we need and deserve. But if New York is to be listened to, we must be perceived as having been willing to sacrifice in order to achieve everything we possibly can on our own. God and Washington will help those who help themselves.
The executive budget and the legislation that I submit in the weeks to come will give the exact details of the program upon which I propose to act. In the meantime, I ask you to read the message, to review the broad range of proposals, to react and to advise so that we can work together.
This work starts where it is always hardest to start with ourselves, with the very conduct of our government, with the way we plan, the way we budget, the way we borrow. We must make government less expensive and more responsive. Reviewing its procedures, improving its operations. Cutting back where we can. Saving, consolidating, reforming. Not just saying it, but doing it. I will propose a comprehensive program of reorganization and fiscal reform. As part of this effort, Sidney Schwartz, my special assistant for management and productivity, will review state agency operations attacking the waste and inertia that demoralize our public employees and diminish the people's faith in their institutions. The first effort of its kind in a quarter of a century in this state. His initial suggestions will be reflected in my first budget.
We will undertake a thorough reorganization of the state's public authorities to make them more accountable and to use their assets more productively. And I will recommend legislation that will strengthen the comptroller's oversight of public authorities and their investment practices. We will restructure our public authorities and we will begin with the MTA. Thanks to the leadership of Senators Anderson and Ohrenstein and Speaker Fink, we have given the MTA over five billion dollars for rebuilding and reconstruction. In return, it seems to me we have the right to demand a firm, efficient mechanism for managing these resources. Within 90 days, I will make proposals to revise the MTA's financial management oversight and operating responsibilities. I endorse the efforts of Assemblyman Jerry Kremer and Senator John Marchi to establish a state advisory commission on Intergovernmental Relations that will scrutinize the entire range of state and local affairs. In view of Lieutenant Governor DelBello's extensive local government expertize, I've asked him to take a leading role in this effort.
To put our fiscal house in order, I will propose a series of budget measures that include the following: reform of the way we adopt the budget. I accept Comptroller Regan's offer to report publicly upon the executive revenue projections and financial plan so that we can adopt a certifiable balanced budget before April 1st. Passage of a multi-year plan to reduce the practice of spring borrowing that in 1982 cost us $216 million dollars in interest payments. That is a proposal advocated for a long time by Senator Ohrenstein. Adoption of a spending cap. Both the Assembly and the Senate have agreed to the concept of a spending cap, and it seems to me it should now be possible for us all to agree on details. Completion of the program of generally accepted accounting principles and passage into law of a strengthened role for the Securities Coordinating Committee and the Public Authorities Control Board. And when we have made all these procedural changes, when we've done what it's necessary to do to balance the budget and to complete the often complicated, sometimes thankless work that this will involve, then we shall have only just begun.
For the purpose of government is not merely to keep accurate books. Four days ago, I told the people of this state that a technically balanced budget that fails to meet the reasonable needs of the middle class and the poor would be the emblem of hypocrisy. To believe otherwise is to turn our backs on entire regions of the state. Ignoring the distress in Buffalo and Lackawanna, the persistence of poverty in the north country, the needs of the unemployed in the southern tier. It would be to deny New York City the aid it will require to maintain a decent level of services, mirroring the federal retreat, that leaves some parts of this nation to prosper and others to scavenge. The real challenge before us is to balance our books the way a family would without abandoning our weak, without sacrificing the future of our young, without destroying the environment that supports us.
In the campaign that just passed. I summed up much of what it is that we have to do with the words jobs and justice. First, let me talk briefly on the subject of jobs. None of us believes, I think, that unemployment in this state is a bloodless abstraction to be balanced against inflation, charted and analyzed as if it were an act of nature, like the rise and fall of the tides or the phases of the moon. It is real people, steel and auto workers, secretaries, laborers, people, young and old, feeling real pain, even shedding real tears. It does them no real good if we merely blame their unemployment on Washington. We must help them and we must help them now. So I will ask you immediately for an increase in the maximum unemployment insurance benefit. Then I will ask you to work with me, in putting the full measure of our resources into economic renewal and development. During the next few weeks, I will recommend a series of capital financing proposals bringing the state and its authorities, the federal government and the private sector all together as partners. In the aggregate, these proposals will generate more than 10 billion dollars in new investment over the next five years. This money will not come from vitally needed state funds, but rather from a combination of public and private financing.
For the past several years, Speaker Fink has, with intelligent foresight, drawn attention to the needs to rebuild our infrastructure. I will ask you to authorize a one and a quarter billion dollar infrastructure bond issue that, if the voters approve, will be used to rebuild bridges, rails and ports in every part of the state. It will flesh out the welcomed federal commitment to the repair of our transportation network. A commitment, incidentally, achieved by the hard work and common agenda of Senators Pat Moynihan and Al D'Amato and the work, indeed, of the entire New York congressional delegation. I hope to complete early agreement with Governor Kean of New Jersey on the creation of a regional financing vehicle funded from surplus revenues of the Port Authority. This could release half a billion dollars in new resources. I will recommend establishment of a state water finance authority empowered to issue up to four billion dollars in revenue bonds and a series of housing financing initiatives that will generate an additional billion dollars in investments in the years ahead. And we will insist that wherever state money is involved, minority businesses and workers have their fair share of the work.
These projects will mean jobs, thousands of them in important and desperately needed work, but they are not by any means the final answer to our economic problems. We need the jobs that only a spirited and expanding private sector can give, the steady spiral of economic activity that accelerates the growth of new industries and permanent jobs that I believe is eminently achievable. Consider. We live in a state that, if taken by itself, would rank as the world's 11th greatest industrial power. A state that has reserves of genius, creativity and ingenuity it has barely tapped, a state with sources of wealth we know it has failed to develop. The government of this state must be prepared to nurture all of this immense potential, helping the private sector to create jobs and giving our people the skills they need to fill those jobs. And we can do it if we do it together.
I will ask that the Urban Development Corporation expand its mission and be reconstituted as the New York State Development Corporation undertaking projects in rural areas as well as in urban areas. I will submit legislation to redirect state pension fund and insurance company investments, making it possible for them to invest in our new businesses. This is a particularly exciting potential source of wealth, especially in these times when capital is so hard to come by. If we could shift just five percent of the 33 billion dollars in our public pension funds into investments in our state, we will provide one point five billion dollars in new capital. A shift of only one percent of the hundred and twenty two billion dollars held by insurance companies will produce another fund of one point two billion dollars.
Together, in partnership, this government will work with labor and industry to plan rationally and creatively, to look beyond the political moment to the projects that will mean the New York's future what Roebling's bridge across the East River and Governor Clinton's canal meant to the whole state. This idea of partnership is particularly important. It is simply no longer practical to pretend that our work can be neatly divided into public and private sectors, that the one can ignore the other cooperating only when we are faced with a collapse of our bridges or the bankruptcy of agencies and industries. That we can afford to have government by itself. Business with itself. Labor of itself. Because this partnership is a prerequisite to any lasting success, I will create a State Council of Economic and Fiscal Priorities composed of leaders from business leaders, from labor leaders, from local government and leaders from our universities to help the state define a long range, coherent economic strategy. The council will be asked immediately to prepare a five year capital plan covering all capital financing and construction in which the state and all of its authorities will engage. The assembly initiated in the comptroller and the Senate have already reviewed this concept. Together, then I think that for the first time in our history, we will be able to put in place a clear and distinct capital budget that will replace what we have now, which is nothing more than a jumble of plans and financing.
I believe that a strong partnership with the private sector will help us gain in government the kind of vision that is regrettably more often found beyond the bureaucracy in the public payroll. It will help us envision the benefits of enormous undertakings like Iconn-Erie that, if successful, could by itself dramatically improve our economic prospects by creating a new link to the West and a new artery of international commerce, while at the same time creating many, many thousands of jobs for New Yorkers. Similarly, we must be prepared to redirect our system of education to the future. The emphasis in our schools must be expanded so that we can gain the skills and abilities that will allow New York to lead the second industrial revolution as commandingly as it led the first. There are tools at hand. The new Federal Job Training Partnership Act gives us the opportunity to redirect education and training programs. Insisting that they can support our overall economic strategy. I will appoint a job training partnership committee to implement this comprehensive statewide plan for training or retraining of workers. The plan will help make sure that training programs are tied to the new demands of our industries and our resources for our state's renewal and redevelopment.
Jobs then and the money that they generate to support the family of New York will be your first priority. However, we are equally required to seek justice, justice that is rooted in order but does not end there. At the present time, despite the three billion dollars spent in this state on criminal justice, each year, the streets of our cities are terrorized by crime. Our suburbs are haunted by it, our businesses intimidated. The criminal justice system, it seems to me, is failing. It must be changed. Incorporating the recommendations of Assemblyman Miller and Senator Marino, I have created the position of Director of Criminal Justice and have appointed Lawrence Kurlander to fill that position. This is a unique office in the history of New York, bringing together for the first time the resources and authority needed for a statewide attack on crime, giving purpose, consistency and cohesion to what is presently a hodgepodge of jurisdictions and police efforts. We will concentrate on the career criminal, the hardcore repeat offender who accounts for the majority of violent crimes in New York. We will establish a new Target Crime Initiative, which will expand aid to counties participating in the campaign against repeat offenders, organizing nine new county programs and bringing state aid to the areas where 90 percent of the people of this state live and where 90 percent of the felonies are committed. Sentencing procedures, I think, need to be reformed. I will propose we develop new, definite sentencing guidelines so that our courts are uniform in the punishments that they impose. And once sentenced, offenders will be released only at the end of an established jail term. Recently, a series of incidents on Long Island highlighted a provision of our law that allows a criminal to commit multiple offenses without receiving punishment for the subsequent ones. This, it seems to me, is inexcusable. I will submit legislation that will increase the maximum jail sentence for such offenders. I know we will again engage in a debate over the death penalty. It is clear that a majority of you favorite and that your consciences call upon you to urge its adoption. I will oppose it. I expect. I expect it will come before me and that it will not become law. But the search for an effective deterrent, should that occur, need not end there. This session, we can pass legislation that allows a jury to recommend life imprisonment without parole. Real, real life imprisonment for whatever period a convicted murderer lives. I believe, with all of my heart that the prospect of imprisonment with no hope of liberation is an effective alternative that will allow society to protect itself from killers without itself having to kill.
A fair, hardworking judiciary is a fundamental element of the criminal justice system. How to create such a judiciary is a prevalent question. The system in place for selection of court of appeals judges will test the effectiveness of so-called merit selection and indicate whether the process provides the depth and reach of talent and experience that we must have in our courts. All these things and more must be done in the attempt to improve a criminal justice system, the ineffectiveness of which has become, I think, a public disgrace.
But justice means more than order. It must also mean social justice. And with this in mind, I will establish an emergency task force on the homeless and appoint a senior member of my staff to serve as coordinator of Housing for the Homeless to break through the present muddle of jurisdictions and agencies. To provide more housing, I will propose a new method of generating capital that will give these often confused, distraught people the safe, clean shelter that should be a basic human right. I will propose rehabilitation of up to 6000 units of permanent housing through the issuance of fifty million dollars in tax exempt bonds for projects sponsored by municipalities and voluntary agencies. Justice requires still more of us. It requires we support and expand the efforts of our attorney general, Robert Abrams, to give our people a safe environment. It demands fair treatment, fair treatment for women, for the disabled, for blacks, for Hispanics, for Native Americans, for all of those who have a full share of this country's burdens, but not a full share of its privileges. To that end, I will reassure the executive order guaranteeing the continuation of all state affirmative action programs.
I want very much to do one more thing. The chance to be where we are today in this chamber, in this state, the honor to serve in elected office is one of the highest privileges afforded by our democracy. We must honor and preserve that privilege by assuring that merit, even without great financial means, has a fair chance to rise up through the political system. But the enormous amounts of money required to run for office today are increasingly eliminating all but the wealthy from doing so. I will propose we enact and approve legislation to provide for public financing of primary and general election campaigns for statewide office and to set limits on overall spending. The assembly has led this effort for the past few years, and I think the time is right now for both houses to see its wisdom.
I end this statement as I began it, recognizing that we face great problems and challenges, the greatest budget gap in the state's history. Punishing, protracted national recession that shows little sign of abating, a consequent need for reordering our finances, reorganizing our government, rebuilding our institutions and rekindling our people's hope. A time of great difficulty indeed, but surely no time for despair. There is simply no question that we have it within us to meet this challenge as we have met so many others. It takes only willingness to believe, to work, to give together. For as long as I have understood our history, I have been consoled by the notion that we are born to a legacy of achievement, to a people who have proven themselves worthiest when the challenges were most severe. We should go forward, therefore confidently, as was said about us by one whose eloquence I could not hope to match:
"We have made this thing, this dream, this land unsatisfied by little ways. We made it and we make it and it's ours. We shall maintain it. It shall be sustained."
Beautiful words and it shall be sustained with a new partnership, a new partnership whose members include the whole family of the great Empire State. Thank you and God bless you.
Alfred DelBello, Lt. Governor: On behalf of the members of the Senate and its president, I would like to thank the members of the Assembly and Speaker Fink for their hospitality in hosting.
Read the 1983 Message to the Legislature here.