ALBANY - State lawmakers reached agreements Wednesday to keep troopers in schools and keep open some medium and minimum security prisons and two juvenile detention facilities targeted for closing to save money.

As the Assembly and Senate kept working on a $124 billion budget for fiscal 2008-2009 that had been due Tuesday, business interests made a last pitch to lawmakers to drop a plan to close corporate tax loopholes to help close a deficit estimated at nearly $5 billion.

“The plan to impose new taxes and fees on New York's financial services industry is an ill-timed decision that could seriously impact this important sector at a time when it can least afford it,” the Business Council of New York State said. “As we face a growing crisis on Wall Street and a faltering national economy, now is not the time to impose additional hardships on the banking and financial services sectors that serve as the bedrock of New York's economy.”

One savings option lawmakers said they'd reject was the proposed shutting of four of New York's 69 prisons, where the inmate population has dropped by 9,000 in a decade to about 62,000 with a staff of 31,000.

Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer had proposed closing Camp Pharsalia in Chenango County, Camp McGregor in Saratoga County, Camp Gabriels in Franklin County and Hudson Correctional Facility in Columbia County. The shutdowns were projected to save $33.5 million in the 2009-10 budget year, plus nearly $30 million in capital costs.

The New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association, which represents guards, opposed the closings, which they said would have affected hundreds of its members, their families, communities and the safety of New Yorkers.

Staff at minimum-security Camp Gabriels in the Adirondacks said inmate crews also do a large amount of work in the region, from cutting trees to removing asbestos, with some gaining marketable skills.

But Bob Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a watchdog group, said more should be done to help prisoners re-enter society instead of keeping prisons open.

“We're carrying a bloated corrections budget of $3 billion and also not doing an adequate job of preparing prisoners for release,” he said. “The state has so many other significant needs that go unfunded, it is bad public policy to keep these jails open as part of a jobs program.”

Gangi said lawmakers also erred in closing only four juvenile detention facilities instead of six as the Spitzer administration proposed - leaving open Great Valley Residential Center in western New York, which has 25 beds and houses 11 children, and Pyramid Intake Center in the Bronx, which has 57 beds, houses 39 children and needs $8 million in capital improvements. It was to be sold for $3.5 million.

“The recidivist rate for kids coming out of the OCFS facilities is 80 percent. By any criterion you apply they're not working,” Gangi said. Money is wasted on empty beds, while community programs need it, he said.

According to the OFCS, which proposed closing the six, there are currently 766 beds at limited secure facilities housing 575 juveniles, and 530 beds at nonsecure facilities housing 282. Among the documented complaints at Pyramid, the intake facility where all the juveniles are sent for their first 14 days, are asbestos, rats and dysfunctional air conditioning.

OFCS proposed doing intakes instead at a Brooklyn facility. In the tentative budget agreement, four facilities would close.

In January, Spitzer also proposed redeploying almost 200 state troopers from schools and video slot-machine centers around New York to high-crime areas, including upstate cities and the Canadian border, saying that would put them where they are most needed in tough fiscal times. The Senate Republican majority in its budget plan rejected moving troopers out of schools, citing children's safety. The Senate's position held through negotiations.

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Associated Press writer Valerie Bauman contributed to this report.

AP-ES-04-02-08 1900EDT