ALBANY - Joe Bruno retired this week as one of New York's most powerful state leaders for 13 years, but not before the former boxer gave another lesson or two in how to land knockouts in Albany's odd political ring.

In his last week on the job, he announced $6 million in state funding to build a new Troy City Hall and another $6 million to expand the City Center in Saratoga Springs, one of the most prosperous communities in the state. In fact, on Friday he had enough largess to point to over his 32 years in office, he needed a bus trip to show it all off to reporters: A new Albany airport, a high-tech research and development center at the state University at Albany and its “east campus,” a new Amtrak train station, “The Joe,” a minor league baseball stadium, and much more.

And New Yorkers in hard-pressed Buffalo, Syracuse, Wampsville, Amsterdam, Brooklyn and other places where Bruno rarely gets even a 40 percent approval rating in statewide polls helped pay for this recession proofing of the 43rd Senate District that Bruno has represented since 1976.

The means is Albany's unusual system where leaders of the majorities - Republican Bruno in the Senate and Democrat Sheldon Silver in the Assembly - control which communities get millions, which businesses get tax breaks, and even which bills get debated.

And Bruno played the system extremely well.

The 79-year-old Republican from Rensselaer County is the outsized example of what's true for most voters around the state this election year: They are bombarded by the good news from their incumbent, often brought to them by taxpayer-paid newsletters, ribbon cutting photos from pork-barrel spending, TV interviews and the other perks of office. The result: Polls have long showed voters like their local senator or Assembly member, who stands a better than 90 percent chance of re-election, but hate the Legislature as a whole.

In this system where political power can trump policy debate, some lawmakers are more equal than others. Bruno and his Republican majority conference in the Senate, for example, collected $4.3 million in campaign contributions in the first six months of this year, four times more than the Democrats, according to records released Tuesday.

The labor unions, healthcare lobbyists, corporations know the sure bets. They usually pay off well, as in the public pension sweeteners pushed by unions each year, two of which will likely boost Bruno's pension to about $95,000 a year.

This cycle of paying back special interests, from labor unions to business leaders, is partly why the state budget has grown to $124 billion, more than double the state budget adopted in 1995.

Bruno's quick smile, good looks and better jokes mask the toughness that got him through the Korean war and Albany. It was Bruno who, with the backing of the new governor-elect, George Pataki, staged a Thanksgiving Day coup in 1994 against fellow Republican Ralph Marino as the Long Island leader visited his mother.

With a Republican governor, Bruno for his first dozen years as majority leader couldn't play the foil and hold out for a deal because Pataki was calling most of the shots and Bruno had to toe the political line. But Bruno also had to be the conciliator, the one to get Pataki and Silver close enough to cut a deal, if anything was to get done.

In Pataki's closing lame duck years in 2005-06, Bruno sided with Silver to override hundreds of Pataki vetoes.

“To some degree, Bruno is the insider's insider and that becomes part of what people are feeling about Albany and how insular it is from the rest of the state,” said Lee Miringoff, of the Marist College poll. “But the positive of that is he provided cohesion to a system that wasn't particularly functional.”

In Bruno-speak, a plain, humorous and sometimes curious lexicon, that's called “getting a result.”

“We need to get a result,” Bruno often said publicly to prod closed-door negotiations. Whether the result was even half of the policy goal seemed to matter less as talks dragged on and Silver, as Bruno put it, “crossed his arms and sat back” refusing to budge. Bruno often provided the only sense of urgency in a place where even critical issues can take years to address and often only as part of a deal linking disparate interests at the negotiating table.

“It's as awful as it ever was,” said Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group. “For Bruno, if anything, his foot was always pushed to the metal in terms of fundraising. His tenure will really be more on the politics in which the state Republicans were able to maintain power in the face of an incredible increase in Democratic enrollment.”

This fall's legislative elections will tell if Bruno will be remembered not only for saving the Republicans' last bastion in New York, but for invigorating it. Senate Republicans have steadily lost seats and currently hold just a one-seat majority. There are 5.4 million registered Democrats in the state and only 3 million registered Republicans.

Despite a continuing FBI probe into his own private business dealings, Bruno was the first to turn the tables on Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a popular Democrat overwhelmingly elected in 2006 and bent on reforming Albany and ending GOP control of the Senate.

A newspaper story based on records provided by the Spitzer administration showed Bruno used state aircraft to attend Republican fundraisers. Within days, Bruno turned it into a story of political sabotage by Spitzer. Within months, Spitzer's political capital with the Legislature and public was gone. By March 17 of this year, the one-time national Democratic star resigned when he was identified in a prostitution investigation.

From they way Bruno talked this week during his lovefest tour of his district, that last knockout was his sweetest.

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Michael Gormley is the Albany, N.Y., Capitol editor for The Associated Press. He can be reached by e-mail at mgormley(at)ap.org.

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