The Capitol Pressroom for February 13, 2012

 

Let’s role play.

Let’s say you’re the mayor of a financially-distressed upstate city. You have a 20 million dollar fund balance but a 16 million dollar current year budget gap. While this year might be covered, next year is looking grim, and that’s without having factored in rising pension and healthcare costs. You do NOT want to be remembered as the mayor who led the city into insolvency, but there are no easy answers here. Who ya gonna call?

Super Ravitch.

That’s what Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner did. In her State of the City address a few weeks ago Miner announced the creation of a 3-person financial advisory board to help city leaders come to terms with Syracuse’s bleak fiscal future. One member of the trio is former Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch who is credited with preventing NYC from falling into insolvency in the mid 1970′s. Both Ravitch and Miner join me on the Capitol Pressroom today to discuss the future of Syracuse.

And what really happened to shape the health care reform debate in the months leading up to passage of President Obama’s health care reform bill? Read Richard Kirsch’s new book to find the answers. Richard Kirsch is an Institute Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government and a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt institute. As the national campaign manager for Health Care for America Now he was on the front lines of the battle to get what critics have dubbed “Obamacare” passed. His new book “Fighting for our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States” wryly documents the PR and political intrigue that shaped the narrative outside the beltway.

And Governor Cuomo joins us to discuss teacher evaluations and the primary kerfluffle.