Senate Pork Top 10
May 5, 2008
Here is the Senate pork spreadsheet as provided by NYPIRG.
It takes a little longer to compile these numbers (compared to the Assembly pork), because the Senate likes to release the data in a format that is more difficult to transfer into Excel.
The Top 10 are:
1) Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, $4.211 million (about $1 million more than Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver plans to personally allocate in this fiscal year).
2) Deputy Majority Leader Dean Skelos, $3.740 million (from Long Island, leader-in-waiting).
3) Sen. Tom Libous, $3.497 million (a Binghamton-area senator once considered a contender for Bruno’s leadership post).
4) Sen. Owen Johnson, $3.276 million (chairs the Finance Committee).
5) Sen. Joe Robach, $2.550 million (a Rochester-area Democrat-turned-Republican who is one of the Senate minority’s top targets this fall).
6) Sen. Thomas Morahan, $2.464 million (a Hudson Valley lawmaker who is the Senate’s liaison to the executive branch).
7) Sen. Dale Volker, $2.446 million (a Western NY veteran lawmaker who recently said he thought someone connected to the State Police was spying on him during the Spitzer administration).
Sen. Serphin Maltese, $2.441 million (of Queens, the Democrats’ top priority to oust).
9) Sen. Frank Padavan, $2.438 million (also from Queens, also in the crosshairs).
10) Sen. Cathy Young, $2.322 million (Western NY senator elected in a 2005 special election to fill the seat of the late Sen. Patricia McGee).
Interestingly, when you compare last year’s pork to what is on tap for this year, only some Democratic targets received more member items (traditionally, a way to beef up support in the home district in an election year), while others didn’t.
Sen. Caesar Trunzo, the majority’s oldest member and a Long Island veteran, went from $2 million to $2.15 million (a 7.50 percent increase), and Robach gained $550,000 (a 27.50 percent increase).
But Maltese and Padavan both went down: Maltese to $2.44 million from $4.0 million (he may have made up the difference in economic development funding, which is not tallied here), and Padavan from $2.44 million to $2.43 million.
Source: NY Daily News from the blog of Elizabeth Benjamin
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