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Mario Cuomo was good at introducing bonds to apply band-aid fixes to the State budget. At one point, he even wanted to sell the Governor's Mansion to a not-for-profit group. How he thought he could do that without the approval of the people of New York State was beyond me. Fortunately it never happened. In 1990, during his last term as Governor, New York State was under another one of his austerity budgets. He introduced a $2 Billion Environmental Bond which was soundly defeated by the public at that fall's elections.

Cuomo was pi$$ed about it, and immediately started coming up with other options of wiping out the debt he had helped create. Besides raising fees on just about everything, and laying off many Civil Service employees, another option he chose was to lag (hold back) one week's pay of State workers. We would work 5 days without pay. The 5 days pay would be given to us upon our retirement or exit from State service. Of course you wouldn't get it if you dropped dead in the meantime. The main issue against this plan was that our salaries had already been lagged two weeks when we started our jobs. We had had to work a month before we even saw our first paycheck, and then it was only for 2 weeks.

Despite protests from the 3 unions, he did it anyway. PERB (Public Employee Relations Board) found he had overstepped his bounds and he was forced to pay us back that money. I doubt we got any interest on it for the time the State had it. Cuomo's popularity went down hill steadily after that, and of course he was beaten by Pataki in '94. I can see the same crap being tried again with Patterson. I'm just glad I'm retired now and the a-holes can't touch me. Well, hopefully they won't screw around with our pensions.