Another Good Program Gone Sour

Opinion
First published in the New York Times, August 19, 2007

Too many politicians are busy thumping their chests and furrowing their brows in Albany these days about whether Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s staff has done anything wrong. It is time to cut the noise, folks; time to get back to work.

The flood of campaign cash is a far bigger scandal than whether Mr. Spitzer’s staff misused the State Police to tarnish State Senator Joseph Bruno, the governor’s Republican nemesis. The Empire Zone program rewards friends of the politically powerful instead of reviving blighted areas. That program alone deserves a lot more investigative attention than the behavior of the governor’s office is getting.

And now, it turns out, the brownfields program — an important initiative to clean up toxic sites known as the Big Uglies and put them to productive use — appears to have gone astray as well.

It does not take much of a cynic to wonder whether the real mission of Albany’s entrenched regulars is to make enough noise about somebody else’s missteps so that nobody notices their own.

Take the brownfields mess, another example of how good ideas can turn into political dross in Albany. The brownfields law was passed in 2003. Its mission was to clean up toxic sites, especially in poorer urban areas. The concept hinged on encouraging developers to detoxify the sites and prepare them for other projects. The main inducement was supposed to be a tax break of 10 to 22 percent of the cost of the cleanup.

But as the Albany crowd turned this worthy idea into law, brownfields became just another way for big developers to lower their taxes.

Few people seem to have understood originally how the law would work, but now the first 52 projects are expected to cost the state over $1 billion — a figure that could rise to $2.5 billion by 2010 if the law remains unchanged. The main reason is that the tax break can reflect the cost of a large percentage of the entire project, not just the cleanup cost. Indeed, the credits can rise to seven or eight times cleanup costs. In one instance, a $7 million cleanup could end up costing the state $24 million in tax breaks. This is an advantage that some of the state’s biggest developers have quickly learned to enjoy.

One unfortunate result is that the money is not being spread around enough to more places that really need it. And the Legislature has failed to wrestle with this difficult issue because — well, it is apparently easier to thump tubs about the horrors of “Spitzergate,” as the tabloids call this particular distraction, than it is to rewrite complex legislation.

Environmentalists in the state have been working hard to get the brownfields law back to its original concept, but they are facing formidable obstacles. Mr. Spitzer has proposed a bill that represents a start but does not do enough to redirect help to lower-income areas. The legislators, meanwhile, are mostly letting the problem fester. (Could it be that these big developers are also big campaign contributors?)

The growing scandal in Albany now is how lawmakers have allowed the Spitzer scandal to stall everything else. The legislature is due back in special session sometime soon, but don’t expect much more than noise if they haven’t got enough important legislation on their agenda to make their return worthwhile.