The Hugh L. Carey Center for Government Reform at Wagner College honors New York’s 55th governor, whose two terms as its chief executive embodied the state’s history as a laboratory and incubator of ideas for reform that have often been adopted by other states and the nation, as well.
In the late nineteenth century, Theodore Roosevelt entered political life as a member of New York’s State Assembly, declaring (in those days of male suffrage only) that if the people desired the best government possible, “the best men” must be willing to devote themselves to public service. During the course of his career in public life, T.R. championed and enacted measures that improved urban policing and civil service — reforms which had significant impacts on curtailing political corruption and improving local, state and national governments’ delivery of services to their citizens.
During the first quarter of the twentieth century, Alfred E. Smith became New York’s governor after many years of service in its State Assembly. His tenure in Albany laid foundations for social welfare initiatives which subsequently served as models for national programs enshrined in President (and former New York State Senator) Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
At the start of a new century, however, New York is mired in stagnation. While there are pockets of economic growth and social vibrancy, particularly in its downstate region, the state is steadily losing population. Industrial manufacturing, both large and small, continues to move out of state and overseas. Agriculture remains depressed and ever shrinking. Many of the service jobs available to replace these lost employment opportunities offer lower wages and reduced health and retirement benefits. New York’s ability to address these threats to its future are deadlocked in what is widely regarded as the most dysfunctional state government in the nation.
Among the dysfunctions which can be changed are:
♦ A budget and budgeting process that are opaque and incomprehensible
♦ Accountability and transparency that are nonexistent
♦ Redistricting procedures designed to ensure incumbency
♦ An undemocratic legislative committee system
♦ Ineffective oversight of lobbying activity that has allowed lobbyists to gain more power through the use of soft money
♦ Total control of legislative agendas by the Assembly Speaker and the Senate majority leader, rather than by rules and procedures.
There is no question that New York’s State Legislature is in need of democratic reform.
Reform, in order to be implemented, requires that those who understand the need for changes have a sustaining institutional base that serves to generate, nurture and develop analyses and proposals. This is the central lesson of reform movements throughout American social and political history, from the Age of Jackson and the Progressive Era to the New Deal.
At this particular moment in our state and nation’s history, colleges and universities are the institutions best suited for conducting the studies necessary to shape and disseminate an agenda for reform:
The academic environment provides multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary resources for analyzing proposed reforms, as well as the impact of proposals once they are enacted.
The academic environment, with its ideals and traditions of rigorous and dispassionate nonpartisan analysis, is far better suited than any number of| ideological think tanks to lay the groundwork for developing a broad consensus of public support for reform proposals.
The academic environment is oriented toward creating multigenerational interest in the need to adapt proposals as conditions change over time.
The Carey Center is currently engaged in preparing a book entitled America’s Empire State Avoids Bankruptcy: Governor Hugh L. Carey and New York’s Fiscal Crisis, 1975-1976, tentatively scheduled for publication in 2009.
