Quoted Text
Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Cost of Sen. Farley’s office: $1M a year
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.
Sen. Hugh Farley of Niskayuna employs 21 staff members and spends a little more than $1 million a year on his office operations, according to official state figures compiled by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, thus ranking No. 14 in the state Legislature for office expenses.
“I have a huge district,” Sen. Farley says by way of explanation. (His district includes Schenectady, Saratoga, Fulton and Montgomery counties.) “I have two district offices” (Amsterdam and Johnstown), “and I chair three committees,” those being banking, libraries and interstate cooperation. Each committee has its own director and its own clerk, whose salaries are charged to Sen. Farley’s account.
I pass this information along in case you are curious as to how much it costs us to maintain our legislators. I do not question the level of activity of the committees that Sen. Farley chairs. The Committee on Libraries or the Committee on Interstate Cooperation may meet day and night and have great need of a full-time executive director and a full-time clerk, for all I know, even though we never hear anything about them, but still, isn’t it interesting? Twentyone staff members to support the labors of one senator representing one district in upstate New York.
The total cost of operating the Legislature for the current year, by the way, is $219 million, which seems to me not small for a body so widely regarded as dysfunctional, with almost all power concentrated in the hands of one leader in each house.
“We have a multibillion-dollar deficit,” says Lise Bang-Jensen of the Empire Center. “Maybe it’s time for the Legislature to examine how it spends its own money,” to which my professional journalistic response is, Hah-hah.
When you hear about the New York State Legislature cutting back on spending on itself, please give me a call.