“I’m spending all my time now going up a learning curve,” Ravitch, 76, said this week at his office on Third Avenue in Manhattan. Top of the agenda is getting up to speed on the state’s falling tax revenues, economic development strategies and infrastructure needs.
In a state that relies on the financial services industry for 20% of its tax revenue, the national recession and credit crunch have pummeled finances, creating an estimated cumulative $38.2 billion budget deficit through fiscal 2013.
Ravitch is well aware that his time in office may be limited, and not only because he won’t be running for reelection next year. State Senate Republicans challenged the constitutionality of his appointment to the post last month by Gov. David Paterson, and a hearing on the matter is scheduled for Tuesday. The position had been vacant since Paterson became governor last year after former Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal.
Ravitch, whose days are filled with meetings with fiscal experts, was reluctant to discuss how the state will close its budget gap. A plan is expected to be released next month.
“I’ll have a hell of a lot more to say in the event that the courts find that I am lieutenant governor,” Ravitch said. But the man who was called upon in the 1970s to rescue the then-nearly bankrupt Urban Development Corp. and who not only created the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s first capital plan but wrote the statute authorizing it to sell bonds was at no loss for words when discussing the state’s long-term infrastructure needs.
“It’s a serious problem, and I think the stimulus bill begins to address it at the periphery but doesn’t deal with it fundamentally,” Ravitch said of the U.S. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. “What do we do now if you assume the stimulus bill as we know it is not going to be renewed or a level of appropriation isn’t going to occur?”
