Shouldn’t we at least talk about the notion of capping school property taxes?

A recent poll found 74% of New Yorkers think it’s a good idea. A commission appointed by our previous governor recommended it after several months of study and more than a dozen public meetings around the state.

And yet, the state Legislature is poised to adjourn for the year without seriously considering the idea. There were no legislative hearings on the commission’s report, and Gov. David Paterson couldn’t even get his bill to cap property taxes introduced in the Legislature.

Whether or not you think capping school property taxes is a good idea (full disclosure: I do), what does it say about our legislative process that an idea with such broad appeal addressing a problem that is clearly impacting on millions of New York residents isn’t taken seriously by our lawmakers?

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It seems you can find out just about anything you want to know about schools in New York — at least when it comes to searching for data.

The state provides information collected from the school districts on everything from attendance to suspensions to dropouts to graduation to test scores. You can find out the demographic breakdown of the student body and how many students come from families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced school lunches. Now, with the federal No Child Left Behind requirements, the state goes beyond reporting aggregate test scores to give the pass rates for subgroups, including low-income and minority students.

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The regularly scheduled session of the New York State Legislature ended this year with no last-minute deals, a lot of unresolved issues and bitter recriminations from Gov. Eliot Spitzer and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

It wasn’t that much different from legislative sessions past, except that in some years lawmakers are able to cobble together more in the way of 11th hour agreements. The bitterness is generally part of the package for whatever matters weren’t resolved.

Except, of course, that Spitzer as a first-term governor had promised to change everything about how Albany operates. That might have produced visions in some people’s minds of a well-oiled legislative machine proceeding in a productive and orderly fashion toward the end of its work.

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There wasn’t much press coverage statewide of a recent big decision by the state Senate – all but one of its 62 members voted for a bill to eliminate school property taxes.

What?! Isn’t this a huge deal? School property taxes are the bane of many a homeowner, and the Senate wants to get rid of them. Shouldn’t that be front-page news from Buffalo to Long Island?

It seems many in the Capitol press corps chose to let this story go by because the legislation is what’s known in Albany parlance as a “one-house bill.” That is, it doesn’t have a sponsor in the other house (the Assembly, in this case), and it’s not going anywhere, practically speaking.

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Nearly half of schools in New York were recently recognized by the state Education Department as high performers. Why that was so was not immediately clear from the news coverage of the event.

Most of the stories repeated the language from the Ed Department’s news release. The schools were designated, they said, “for meeting all applicable state standards and showing adequate yearly progress in English and math for two years.”

OK, but what are the state standards, and what constitutes “adequate yearly progress”? I decided to find out. Now I understand why the reporters didn’t bother trying to explain the answers in the space allotted by their newspapers.

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Just how many men (and women) should be in the room when state leaders try to negotiate a budget, or anything else?

For years, we New Yorkers have been complaining about Albany’s “three men in a room” custom, which brings together the governor, Assembly speaker and Senate leader into a back room to negotiate deals out of the public eye. The sense has been that these three make all the decisions in secret, and legislators and the public have nothing to say about it.

Even before Gov. Eliot Spitzer took office, leaders began making small changes in this practice, occasionally gathering for public leaders’ meetings covered by the press. Spitzer has taken the changes a step further, inviting the leaders of the minority parties in each house and a few other legislators to take part.

The result was a session on May 16 described by reporters present as full of sniping, fingerpointing, grandstanding, taunting and giggling. At one point, Spitzer felt it necessary to assert his authority by saying, “This is my room and we’re going to play by my rules.”

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Talks on reforming New York’s campaign-finance system recently fell apart in Albany. No surprise there. Of all the possible government reforms, campaign finance could be the most unpopular among legislators, perhaps running even with nonpartisan redistricting.

The reason is obvious. These two powers – to raise buckets of campaign cash and to draw the borders of legislative districts (including those you want and excluding those you don’t) – form the heart of incumbent power in the Legislature. Getting them voted into law by those very same incumbents will be a neat trick.

Yet Gov. Eliot Spitzer promised during last year’s campaign to work to fundamentally change how state government works, and in the past week he has made a slew of proposals following through on that pledge. Not only did he propose to lower various types of campaign contribution limits, he also proposed legislation to overhaul the court system and to revamp election law, including, yes, establishing a redistricting process independent of (though influenced by) the Legislature. (He also introduced a bill to allow marriage between gay people – it was a busy week.)

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New York is an old state. That gives us a proud history to reflect upon, from the rising of the New York City as the world’s financial capital to the birth of social reforms and protections for workers to the construction of public engineering marvels like the Erie Canal.

It also gives us a woefully outdated structure of government that has proven incredibly resilient despite many criticisms and calls for change.

The latest evidence comes from a Center for Governmental Research project — prepared for the Long Island Index — comparing the structure and cost of government on Long Island to that of another densely populated suburban area: Northern Virginia.

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A couple months ago, I suggested that New York might be better off with a late budget than an on-time one. I wondered if our new governor, Eliot Spitzer, might conclude that winning concessions on the budget might be worth the political cost of breaking the two-year record of “timely” budgets.

But for the past week, Spitzer and legislators have scrambled to negotiate, print bills and pass the budget on time. The result is a relatively on-time budget (one day late) that raises spending 7 percent.

Spitzer and legislators added $1 billion to Spitzer’s proposed budget despite having agreed earlier that there was only $575 million in revenue to add to the budget. The budget total is still a moving target, even though the bills have been passed, but in the neighborhood of $121 billion.

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In the increasingly heated battle over health-care funding in Albany, health interests are using plays from their traditional playbook, while Gov. Eliot Spitzer is employing some new and unusual tactics.

Hospital lobby groups brought some 3,000 workers to the Capitol to protest more than $1 billion in spending reductions proposed by Spitzer in the state budget due April 1. The hospital groups and powerful health-care unions have also paid for television ads criticizing Spitzer’s plan, saying it’s all about cuts and not true reform of the health-care system, as Spitzer has argued.

These tactics have proved successful in the past. Similar ads and shows of force persuaded the Legislature in years past to reject health cuts suggested by former Gov. George Pataki.

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