I’ve been meaning to write something about Senator Fumo for a long time because he is one of the two most fascinating late 20th centry urban politicians I’ve seen in action. (The other was Kevin White, a three term Mayor of Boston who was the first to build a mostly white collar political machine.)
This is not that post…and it may take me a while to get to write the whole thing.
But since others at YPP have raised opened the door a bit…
On an issue I have worked on for years, public transit, Senator Fumo was indispensible. You will recall how at the end of the last session, Governor Rendell and Rep. Evans were insisting that there would be no budget deal without funding for public transit. But no one had found a way to raise the funds.
Senator Fumo did.
Selling bonds in anticipation of tolling I-80 and raising tolls on the Turnpike was a stroke of genius. It enabled the state to find money for transit (and roads and bridges) without raising taxes, which was anathema to all the Republicans in both houses for ideological reasons and not a few Democrats because they did not want to run for reelection having voted for a tax increase.
One element that made the plan particularly appealing to some politicians was that it headed off Rendell’s plan to sell the turnpike. Now why would politicians care about selling the Turnpike? One reason is that, from top (the Turnpike Commission) to bottom (the toll takers), the Turnpike is a massive pit of patronage. Whenever an important office holder or party official loses an election and needs a well-paid sinecure, the Turnpike Commission looks awfully nice. Whenever some ne’er do well friend of a friend of a politician needs a job, the first place the pol looks is the Turnpike tolltakers. Almost anyone can take tolls, after all. It is not an easy job. But it is not exactly a high skill job. And, because it is a unionized job, it pays well. And thus the relevant union, AFSCME I believe, was happy to see Rendell’s plan blocked.
Selling bonds in anticipation of revenues is also an important part of the transaction. Anytime the government sells bonds, some bond lawyers and bankers make a lot of money. And some of that money flows back into the system in the form of campaign contributions. The politician who can help direct where those contributions go, can be an influential player in a legislature and thereby help enact legislation that might otherwise be stalled.
Moreover, when the government sells bonds backed by tolls on a road (or bridge), it becomes more difficult for the government to sell that asset. That makes it even harder for this or some future governor to carry out the plan to sell the Turnpike. And that’s a good thing not only for the pols and unions who like the Turnpike the way it is but because selling the Turnpike is, for lots of reasons I won’t go into here, very bad public policy. (Anyone who has read chapter in The Power Broker on how Robert Moses used the Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority’s bond covenants to keep Triboro in operation long after the bridge was paid for should recognize this maneuver.)
On top of all this, Senator Fumo arranged for a much larger portion of sales tax revenues to turned over to public transit and for the $75 million cap on these funds to be removed. I’m still not sure how he did that, but there is a rumor that not everyone in the room at the time this deal was made understood the implications of some details in the legislation Fumo was proposing. (If you have read the chapter in the Power Broker called “The best bill drafter in Albany, you know how this sort of thing is done.)
Now we progressive are not supposed to like this kind of politics. We like everything to be done out in the open and in a transparent fashion. We don’t like patronage and we don’t like businessmen or lawyers or bankers who make money off the government giving campaign contributions. The deepest question for the progressive movement however is whether we can attain the substantive goals we seek–things like new dedicated and inflation proof funding for transit and a roadblock in the path of selling the Turnpike–without the kind of politics Senator Fumo practices, better than anyone else in the state. We would have to build the kind of organization and a degree of citizen engagement involvement that is far greater than anything we progressives have managed to create so far. And we would have to learn to deploy that organization in a focused way.
That is the challenge for anyone who wants to replace Senator Fumo’s kind of politics.
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