1989 New York State of the State Address

Announcer: From the state capital in Albany, Governor Mario M. Cuomo's, annual message to the legislature, the state of the state address. Both houses of the state legislature, the Senate and Assembly have gathered in the assembly chamber to hear Governor Cuomo's seventh state of the state message. The governor's speech is a condensation of a more detailed document which was distributed to members of both houses of the legislature this morning. In his address, Governor Cuomo will outline the challenges facing New York state government in the coming year and will offer his recommendations for dealing with them. Governor Cuomo is introduced by Lieutenant Governor Stan Lundine. 

Lt. Governor Stan Lundine:  Pursuant to a resolution duly adopted in each of the houses of this legislature, the Senate and the 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. It is a pleasure to present to you at this time the governor of our state, Mario M. Cuomo. 

Governor Mario M. Cuomo:  Thank you, very grateful for the opportunity to welcome you back once again to Albany. It seems like only yesterday that you were here and it was. I congratulate you all on your elections. And I extend my particular congratulations to our newest legislative leader, the temporary president and the majority leader of the Senate, Ralph Marino. Well, Ralph, we wish you well indeed. 

 I look forward to working with Senator Marino, with Speaker Mel Miller, with Clarence Rappleyea and Fred Ohrenstein. And with all of you and what will be an extraordinarily challenging year. There is one individual, however, who will not be working with us this year, and he will be missed. After 36 years of exemplary service to the state, he deserves an expression of our respect and gratitude, Warren Anderson. 

I know out there somewhere we have two other very distinguished guests that I'd like to acknowledge. One, the former governor of this state, the other a hardworking, distinguished senator who represents us with diligence and loyalty and effectively: Hugh Carey and Al D'Amato. Where are you? I know you're there somewhere. 

This day is always an exciting one for all of us who are privileged to serve the people of this great state. And it is truly a great state. From its humble beginnings, surrounded by a world of wild, natural abundance and exhilarated by a new freedom, our state has grown into the eighth largest economy in the world. The center of the nation's vast financial network, a magnet that draws professionals in every imaginable human endeavor and the gateway to opportunity for ten generations of people, many of whom would have found it nowhere else. Time and time again, New York has shown the nation the path to the future. Digging and engineering the canal that opened a whole new era of commerce in America, declaring forever wild huge tracts of land a century before the word environment came into common usage. In this very chamber, Franklin Roosevelt and the legislators of his day developed and tested programs and policies that rescued an entire nation from ruin. And from here, Governor Thomas Dewey echoed Roosevelt's practical blend of fiscal restraint and social progressivism, promoting the welfare of our poorest citizens and budgetary prudence equally. We are a part of it. All of us in this room, Republicans and Democrats alike, are part of this historically unusual politics of compassion and common sense, progressivism and pragmatism that I have called the New York idea. It's a politics wider than party partizanship. It's a politics that soars high above ideology to pledge allegiance first and foremost to the common good. And it's a politics that works. The New York idea has proven itself again and again, not only in times of plenty, when the only test is how well you distribute abundance, but especially in the hard times. Times like these, frankly, when revenues are scarce and elected officials are forced to choose from difficult, perhaps even painful, solutions. Now, many of us have already been through such hard times together, more than once. In 1975, we were virtually bankrupt. And in my first year as governor, in 1983, we faced a deficit of nearly two billion dollars and came out of that difficult test stronger than ever. Think back. We remembered in 1983 the lessons taught to us by Roosevelt and Dewey and Hugh Carey. We worked together and together we balanced our budget and preserved our tradition at the same time of service to those most in need in this state. And then we went on to strengthen our economy and to invest massively in a broad and bold renewal. Now our income tax rates are the lowest in more than 20 years. We've reached the most favorable unemployment rate in 19 years. We've helped tens of thousands of people move from the welfare rolls to productive work. There are today over one million more New Yorkers at work than there were in January of 1983. 

We've begun the decade of the child with huge investments and new ideas. We rebuilt our education system, our roads and bridges, our criminal justice system, our mental health and mental retardation systems, and our system of environmental protection. We have proven, ladies and gentlemen, that we can handle hard times. We did it in 1983 and in 1975 and before. We can handle them and then still working together in a few years, we proved we can bring this date to the threshold of a whole new era of greatness built upon the solid bedrock of our shared achievements. And that's where we are now. But now, as we have from time to time in the past, we encounter another serious obstacle along the road to progress.

This time, a sudden shrinkage of expected revenues has shaken states from coast to coast, from California to Massachusetts. Ours included. It Is now already clear that, at least for a while, our revenues will simply not support the generous rate of growth and expenditures that we've seen the last several years. Unless we raise corporate, sales or income tax rates and that I oppose because it could badly damage our competitive position. 

Well, then how should we proceed? Recognizing there is much still to be done in this state and realizing that we have less than we expected or wanted in order to do it all. First, we must close the budget gap of the present fiscal year without any further delay, recognizing that every day that we fail to act only makes the problem worse by costing us more. Then we must move on to adopt, certainly on time and I hope early a budget for next year that closes an anticipated gap between projected revenues and expenditures of more than two billion dollars, two billion dollars. That can only be done by a combination of tighter management, spending discipline and additional revenues. And I would put the emphasis on tighter management and spending discipline. And with that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I will submit to you in about two weeks a general fund budget for next year that will grow, but it will grow only under the rate of inflation. And even a no real growth budget will require you and me to raise hundreds of millions of dollars more in new revenues to meet our most urgent needs. And we will have to do it without increasing our corporate, sales or income tax rates.

I'm pleased to hear the applause, apparently someone out there knows how they're going to do it. But we... It's not going to be easy. It is not going to be easy. It will take political competence at least, and considerable courage as well, I'm sure. Because although we have spent generously since 1983 and growth will continue in the new budget, there will be immense political pressure for still more spending beyond what I propose. But I believe, ladies and gentlemen, it will be clear to all of us who are burdened with the obligation of making the decisions that we will have to withstand that pressure or jeopardize much of the progress that we've worked so hard together to achieve in the last several years. Now, we'll speak more of these details, obviously, in just a short time. 

In two weeks, I'll give you the budget and before then, we'll be talking to you and to the public about it. But given these constraints, we will have to be sure to put first things first, needs before wants, programs that affect the essential quality of life of our citizens before less urgent programs. And one such essential matter today dominates our attention and must engage all of our intelligence and all of our energy. It is the single most ominous phenomenon of our times. It is our greatest vulnerability now and the most severe threat to our future. It is the spread of drug abuse with all of its horror. 

Every day, more children surrender their bodies and souls to crack, driven to madness, robbed of their childhood, left desperate and broken and dangerous. Thousands and thousands more lives are being lost or ruined each year. Billions of dollars, billions in costs and lost productivity. Our future workforce is debilitated, the lives of today's citizens in peril. A terrible new explosion of violent drug crimes. So many more arrests, lLadies and gentlemen. So many more convictions and sentencings that we could be bankrupted providing the police, the prosecutors, the courts and the prisons that we need. And still, despite that, the drugs continue to come pouring across our borders and our people line up, literally line up for the chance to destroy themselves. What parent does not dread it? What citizen is not afraid of it? Our whole society is appalled by it.

We must strengthen our already vigorous effort to fight this plague every way that we can. We must find the resources to continue with our strenuous and expensive law enforcement effort, using our criminal justice tools as aggressively as possible for all and whatever deterrent value that they have. Our successful Regional Drug Enforcement Task Force is involving federal, state and local officials must be expanded to additional sections of the state that are hardest hit by drug dealers. And again, this year, I will ask you to establish a sentence for murder of life imprisonment without any chance of parole. I will propose that you include among the crimes that merit this punishment, murder committed in the course of a drug transaction. And in addition, I will propose that you amend the felony murder statute to include drug related murders. I will also, I will also proposed legislation that increases substantially the punishment for the despicable criminals who involve children in drug transactions. 

Don't you agree with me that it is an affront to a civilized, law abiding, hard working society, that drug dealers should be living in mansions, driving exotic automobiles and hoarding millions of dollars of blood money? While we must go begging to teach our children how to defend themselves or to rescue those who have already been taken, this is wrong. This year, we must pass laws that are constitutional, of course, that allow us to confiscate that stolen wealth and then use it in our law enforcement, our education, our rehabilitation.

 We will be tougher than ever.

At the same time, it is already apparent that no matter how severe our laws, how hard our punishments, how huge our prisons, law enforcement alone will not be enough to protect us. Ask any law enforcement expert. Experience has taught us that as long as people decide to take drugs, there will be drugs for them to take no matter what you do with law enforcement. As long as there is a demand, there will be a supply. No matter what we do and the inevitable devastation will follow. We must end the cruel cycle before it begins. We must as soon as we can, and as early as we can, teach our children not to take drugs, not even to try them in our schools, in our churches and our synagogues, on television, on billboards, every way that we can. Everywhere that we can. We must teach our children not to take drugs. 

This year, we will reaffirm our strong commitment, therefore, to specialized school based drug prevention programs, we'll expand our efforts to even younger children, we'll widen our successful youth drug prevention campaign so that more young people are exposed to positive role models. That's been very effective. The children of substance abusers, no surprise, are at particular risk of becoming abusers themselves. And so we will invest more in programs of early identification and intervention with these young people to stave off their involvement with drugs. And the money will be in the budget. And those who have already been captured, we must seek to bring back to health and sobriety with effective rehabilitation. Now, on that score, I offer you this goal. There should be a drug rehabilitation program available in this state for every individual who needs and wants one. Obviously, we cannot today guarantee everyone who needs a treatment, who needs treatment, a place in our program. But that must be our objective, our real objective at both the state and the federal levels, despite the cost. And the budget I present to you will begin that work in a meaningful way. I will propose in that budget that we add five thousand five hundred treatment places to our current rehabilitation system. Now, in order to reflect these new emphases on prevention and rehabilitation, I recently tied together more closely than before our law enforcement agencies with the agencies of our government that teach and reteach that habilitate and rehabilitate. And they will be organized into a new anti-drug abuse council that will function regularly, indeed continuously, under the supervision of the highest level of the executive branch of this government. It will be chaired by Lieutenant Governor Lundeen. 

Ladies and gentlemen, if we do it right, we will in this state use every program or device that has proven effective anywhere in the United States of America. And then we will find new ones of our own. For what more important struggle should we reserve our strength?

Let me know if I may suggest a broader perspective that occurs to me after reflecting upon this awful drug syndrome, as I know you have, and it applies equally to other issues that will concern us this year.

It seems to me that many of the worst problems faced by our children and the larger community are not caused by acts of God or an inscrutable fate. They are produced rather, at least in the beginning, by personal decisions. They're voluntary acts, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, children being born to children. AIDS. These most often originate in voluntary decisions by individuals, and it seems to me increasingly evident that the larger and more fundamental cause of many of our problems is a fundamental confusion in making those decisions, a disorientation, a foundering that produces tragically bad choices. Isn't it clear that too many of our young are not sure of what is worth pursuing, what is owed to themselves, what is owed to others? And is it too much to say that, at least in part, this must be the fault, at least the responsibility of those who are charged with setting the standards and pointing the way? Don't you agree that we must do more to help our children and ourselves to make different and wiser decisions? I think that should be our new emphasis with respect to drugs, I've said that, but generally as well. We must find ways to put a new emphasis on values like discipline, respect, responsibility, community. A new way to convince our children of their own dignity and that of every other person, convince them that there's no greater high than reaching for their dreams. Surely in an ideal world, this would not be government's work, not yours and not mine, not here. It would be best done by the family and at home or perhaps from a pulpit or in a synagogue. But in this world, in this day of more fragile families and a thousand perverse influences everywhere around us, I believe government has a proper role.

And one way the state can help is through instruction in the education system. The Board of Regents has indicated a willingness to include values components in the state's curricula. We should encourage them to be aggressive about promoting that component for actual use in our schools. And beyond the curriculum, schools should offer students, I think, opportunities to apply, especially the communal values that we profess to share. Real opportunities through volunteerism, to serve younger students, to serve older residents, to serve the sick and the homebound, anyone who can use the help that students can provide. I believe we should get our young people more involved. And I will propose ways to do that.

In addition to instructing them, however, and involving them, there is something more we must do, and it's probably even more significant. if we want to convince our people, our children and others not to be reckless with their lives we must give them something to live for, something real, something good, a house worth sleeping in, a community worth living in, an education. We must show them a better alternative. We must give them training that leads them to good jobs. And that has always been this government's mission. That was the essence of Roosevelt. The essence of true of Dewey. The essence of Rockefeller. The essence of Carey. And it is the focus of the decade of the child which began last year, I think so productively. With our Liberty Scholarship Program, we became the first state in the United States of America to guarantee that no student who was qualified will be denied a solid college education only because he or she is poor. That's never been done anywhere. We did it for the first time.

We made medical care more accessible both to children and to their mothers. We assured that more children would get the nutrition they need. And this year, we must continue all these good commitments. But again, I believe they are not enough. How do we, for example, in the decade of the child, explain that in the last six years, our budget has grown overall by more than 50 percent. We've been very generous. Some people say we've spent too much on our budget, but our level of public assistance to the children of the poorest families remains shamefully low. How do we explain that? I will call upon you to recognize our first obligation, by raising the basic assistance grant to poor families who are overwhelmingly not thirty-six year old males who won't work and who are sitting somewhere in a rocking chair on a porch swigging a can of beer with your money. These people are overwhelmingly children and their mothers, desperate for a chance to work and denied it. They're entitled to at least a 15 percent increase. 

Another thing we must do is to expand the supply of quality child care services throughout the state, and my program this year will include a number of ways to help expand child care. At the same time, we have to insist that parents fulfill their obligations. It may mean you... is it right? Do you think it's right for one parent to live in comfort while his or her children and their custodial parent are forced to live in poverty? I will again submit legislation passed by the assembly last year establishing court guidelines for the setting of child support awards to ensure fairness and a decent respect for parents responsibilities. I would remind you that if you fail to do it, it will cost us approximately one hundred million dollars in federal funds. That's an added motivation, I hope. 

Now, we have tried many things to help our children and some obviously work better than others. But nothing nothing works better than early intervention in education. My budget will provide for the further expansion of pre-kindergarten education throughout the state of New York. And speaking of education, whether it pre-K or any other level, the success of our schools will depend upon teachers and administrators. I believe the time has come in this state to properly and officially recognize their status in our society. The law of this state should make our teachers and administrators, licensed professionals under the Board of Regents. And I will propose it to you this year. And in a substantial addition to our Liberty Scholarship program. I plan to introduce a new initiative to make higher education more accessible for all children in New York State, whether they choose the public or private colleges. The Liberty College Savings Program will offer parents the advantage of a low denomination, tax exempt, tax exempt bond issued by the state's public authorities that would mature when the children reach college age.

Now, the best way to teach values, you'll get the first one...The best way to teach values, of course, is by example. Young people, we know, are more inclined to do what we do than to do what we say. And that having been said, how can we expect our youth to be sensitive and compassionate if we let hundreds of people continue to live on the freezing streets of our cities or in our subways or burned out buildings? Unless we continue to work toward the day when every person in this state has a place to call home and a bed to sleep, we will have to admit to ourselves, to our children, to everyone that we are prepared to accept failure as a society. Together, we've made available more than five billion dollars for New York statewide housing needs. Now we should get together, you and I, and find ways to convert that money more swiftly and more efficiently into actual housing. And I will propose ways in the budget to do that.

Having having done that, we should reflect on others in this society, like the homeless, who have a claim on our compassion. In my executive chamber, what used to be called the Red Room, two weeks ago we had a party for children around the Victorian Christmas tree that has been on display throughout the holidays. it's still there, incidentally, and some of you want to take a look at it. It really is worth seeing. But at this party, I was particularly struck by one beautiful little child being held by one of the nuns, maybe four years old. Wonderful round face, curly black hair, great big magic smile. She kissed me, said Merry Christmas, Governor. It's wonderful. And a moment later, the nun told me that the child was one of the AIDS babies. There were six of them, born to die. Chances are she will not live to be more than five, six, possibly seven. And we have more like those children being born every week. Born to Die. One out of every 80 babies, one out of every 80 babies born in New York City now is born to an HIV positive mother. We now have approximately one out of every four AIDS cases in the United States of America. How can we not do more? This year, in addition to our ongoing program of education and research and counseling, I'll propose a program for women most at risk of giving birth to HIV positive babies, the development of a new type of adult care facility for persons with AIDS, an expansion of our community service programs to assist us in our education and prevention efforts. Broader efforts. Broader efforts. Better efforts to reach I.V. drug users. Special programs to reach high risk adolescents. And more. And all of these programs will be funded in my budget. And it won't be easy, but it has to be done.

There's still another group of our people most in need are mentally ill and mentally retarded. As you know, for six years we have been engaged in the ambitious task of shifting the focus of the agencies that serve them from reliance on large institutions to the development of adequate, comprehensive services in the community. To achieve this, in the last six years, we increased funding to the Office of Mental Health 98 percent, nearly a 100 percent increase in mental health, and we ought to be very proud of that. For all of the people who have called us neo socialist, big spenders, nearly a 98 percent increase in mental health. Now, we will not be able to keep that pace now, but we will see to it that these services continue to grow in the budget that I submit to you. 

Another basic value that's very much a part of the fabric of this state is the practical and moral obligation of preserving the earth we inhabit. And a vital part of our grand effort at renewal in the Empire's state is our struggle to cleanse and protect the environment around us. The new Adirondack Commission will help us preserve the magnificent heritage of our Adirondack wilderness, even as we try to save ourselves from an avalanche of garbage and solid waste. Now, in 1988, we provided almost 20 million dollars in grants to local governments to develop solid waste programs. Not enough. We knew that. This year I will propose the establishment of a solid waste management fund to provide grants to local governments for a whole range of recycling, waste reduction, landfill closure and other programs. It will be funded in part by unclaimed beverage container deposits.

Ladies and gentlemen of the legislature, respectfully, with local governments all over this state pleading with us for more resources, how do we explain to them that we have not even tried to use more than three hundred and sixty million dollars in unclaimed deposits that rightfully belong to the people's effort to clean the environment, which you all agree we need to fund? How do we explain that we left three hundred and sixty million dollars with bottlers and distributors and never even had a hearing on it? This year of scant resources, is the time, Joe, to do the right thing and take back the people's money for the people's purposes? We must take at least part of the 360 million.

Ladies and gentlemen, even in this year of imposing budget challenges, this great state will have a strong, even an ambitious agenda of programs designed to meet the needs and reasonable expectations of our nearly 18 million people. That's why we're here, to help improve the conditions of people's lives. We believe that if all we managed to do was to balance the budget with absolute precision, all the columns of the ledgers neatly symmetrical, if that were all we did and left the needs of the middle class and the poor unmet, we would regard those books as the emblem of our hypocrisy and failure. So we have a rich agenda. In addition to all that we now do, you will see in the message before you many important new initiatives set out. Many will be described in much greater detail, of course, in the budget.

These initiatives demonstrate our continuing commitment to agriculture, to rural New York, to jobs and economic development, to rebuilding our infrastructure. Thank goodness, and congratulations on the three billion dollar bond issue that happened because of this legislature and for fighting for it in the in the streets and in the counties all over the state. A lot of people thought you couldn't. Did it do it? You did it. Congratulations. I thought you couldn't did it either. 

 You can did it if you want to. [00:38:49][1.1]

[00:38:52] We're committed to the development of the workforce of the 21st century, committed to our elderly, to the Indian nations and to veterans, and you'll find new initiatives, many of them, to strengthen our historic rights of free speech and free press. Remember, this is the bicentennial year of the Bill of Rights. You'll find expanded ethics laws, provisions to assure voter accessibility, including something I'm particularly interested in, a constitutional amendment to allow Election Day registration. And once again, a campaign finance bill. These are all designed to enhance one of our most valuable gifts, the right to self determination. And once again, and once again, I will submit to you a bias related violence bill in full confidence that it expresses the judgment of the people of this state against discrimination and in favor of fair treatment of all of our people, of whatever race, whatever color, whatever national origin, whatever age, whatever sex, whatever disability, whatever sexual orientation. And I would ask you to sign that bill. Give me that bill this year.

Ladies and gentlemen, you and I should look forward, I think, to the work of this year with the confidence that we have earned over the past six years and armed with a set of common beliefs, say values, that guide us as they guided Roosevelt and Dewey. Those values include a deep belief in the importance of the individual and of the free enterprise system that allows each individual the fullest opportunity. But they include as well, a belief that we have obligations to one another. A belief in the importance of something larger than ourselves. A belief in a sense of mutuality that merges smaller concerns and the good of the whole community. It has many names. I call it family. We call it mutuality. But in the end, it is the New York idea. And you and I are charged with the obligation of keeping that idea alive. It is a great, great privilege. It can also be very difficult. This year it is a particularly formidable challenge, because at the same time that you and I rejoice that our own extraordinary good fortune and thank God we've done well, haven't we? But as we rejoice that our own good fortune, we know that there are all around us in every district that you represent, in every corner of this state, thousands upon thousands of people yearning. Some of them anguishing because they have not yet shared in the abundance that you and I have enjoyed and maybe sometimes take for granted. And we know it will be difficult to help them this year, given a substantial budget deficit, an already heavily burdened tax structure and all the inevitable political pressures. But I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, it is not a challenge we can avoid and it is not a challenge we should be afraid of. 

 We did not grow from a struggling colony to greatness by running away from or failing to meet our hard tests. One after another, we have faced them and overcome them, each time drawing up new strength and reaching higher and grander levels of achievement. It is the most demanding times that have made us the most proud of our politics. And now it is time to make ourselves proud again. And together, I'm sure we will. Thank you. God bless you. 

Read the 1989 Message to the Legislature here.