Sen. Ruben Diaz, Sr. | AP Photo/Hans Pennink On eve of session, many lawmakers sour on Cuomo

ALBANY — After plans for a special session and a long-sought pay raise for lawmakers collapsed in the days before Christmas, members of the state Legislature are entering Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s seventh year in a particularly sour mood.

“Of course people are angry, and he deserves it,” state Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr., a Democrat from the Bronx, said. “We’ve got to send the governor a message: you have to respect us.”


A common view among legislators is that Cuomo interfered with the work of a supposedly independent commission that was tasked with recommending adjustments to their $79,500 base pay, the first raise since 1998.

This unexpected deviation — the governor’s appointees led the commission to adjourn without recommending a salary increase — provided the impetus for a special session Cuomo, grappling with the indictment of members of his inner circle, hoped could leverage reform measures against a pay raise.

Amid frustration in the wake of the session’s collapse, the governor announced he would end the 90-year tradition of a formal State of the State address to legislators in Albany and replace it with six presentations around the state.

Diaz Sr. said Cuomo was “afraid to face the legislators,” mindful of the way Assemblyman Charles Barron, a Democrat from Brooklyn, heckled him during last year’s speech. State Sen. Jim Tedisco, a Republican from suburban Schenectady, promised to introduce a bill that would require the governor to address legislators in the Capitol.

“Let's hope no president decides to deliver the State of the Union address in our four different time zones,” Tedisco said on Twitter.

Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s chief of staff, said the new format would better engage with the state’s citizens.

“The State of the State is an opportunity for the governor to lay out the state’s priorities for the upcoming year, and this year we plan to do it a little differently,” DeRosa stated last week. “Our efforts have focused on regional development strategies across the state and we want the opportunity to lay out regional accomplishments, goals and challenges. Next month, the governor will bring his message directly to communities statewide, announcing regional initiatives and groundbreaking proposals he will advance in 2017. The governor looks forward to articulating his vision for a stronger, brighter New York in the weeks ahead.”

Senate Republican leader John DeFrancisco, a consistent critic of the special session planning, said the new maneuver was “an early beginning of his [re-election] campaign, and anybody else who looks at it differently is, I think, looking through rose colored glasses.”

Former Assemblyman Jack McEneny, an Albany Democrat and legislative historian, told POLITICO last week during a ceremony at the Capitol that he was unhappy when Cuomo, in 2011, moved the annual address from the Assembly chamber to a nearby convention center.

“He’s moved away from the message to the Legislature and made it the message to the media, the message to the people. Now the legislators will be watching it on TV. Where are they going to show up? Which one do they go to?” McEneny said. “Moving this State of the State out is probably not a good way to build bridges in preparation for a new budget or legislative year.”

On Monday, an anonymous Cuomo administration official trashed legislators who have begun talking about more oversight hearings and a firmer stance against him.

"They are as transparent as they are transactional,” the Cuomo aide told the Daily News. “They didn't get their pay raise so now they threaten they are going to be dysfunctional? It's extortion and they wonder why 70 percent of the public wouldn't give them a raise.”

DeFrancisco repeated his assessment of Cuomo as a particularly self-serving politician.

“There have been civil relationships between the various legislators. I would describe my relationship as an arm’s length one,” he said. “As long as you deal with him in that sense, I think the relationship will be fine.”