In what can only be called a disappointment for those who were hoping to finally get real fiscal reform for New York, Gov. David Paterson's budget presentation was a big letdown - big enough that his whole spending proposal, $121.1 billion, is likely to be increased, making New York's fiscal crisis even greater. It is, for all intents and purposes, a useless document for budget discussions.

The mix of tax hikes (way too many) and budget cuts (way too few) has already generated the expected buzz from opponents to make passage of most of his proposals almost impossible. Within hours of its release the New York State Republican Party, a group that was all but dead in recent months (just witness their loss of the state Senate last month), had an e-mail out in opposition to the 137 new or increased taxes proposed.

Hospitals, which would see limits in the growth of reimbursements, are already lobbying against their facilities getting hit.

Expect local school boards to also mount a barrage of criticism for the plan that sees a 3.3 percent cut in aid. The Cayuga/Onondaga County BOCES superintendents were scheduled to meet Wednesday morning for their analysis of the cuts and their impact. By 10:30 a.m. the day the budget proposal was released, a school district member in Madison County said that her district was already strategizing over the $600,000 her district is slated to lose. By the way, don't expect such proposed cuts to be enacted - the Legislature is notorious for increasing school spending above what any governor proposes, whether they be Democratic or Republican.

And even with all this controversy, the bottom line is that New York's spending habits haven't substantially changed. The governor's proposed budget of $121.1 billion is an increase in spending of $1.4 billion. One has to ask, if New York really is in fiscally dire straits, why was there a 1.1 percent increase in total spending, when last week we were told that there was a $14 billion budget gap?

The governor, who has done an excellent job in educating and warning New Yorkers about the state's sad fiscal state, has blinked when it came to making substantial changes in the way New York does business - and that is a major disappointment for those who had hoped for and expected more.

Normally, the proposed budget from a governor does not come out until after the first of the year. In this case, the governor released his ideas almost a month in advance to get the Legislature to work on putting a spending plan in place long before start of the new fiscal year on April 1. Instead, Paterson has allowed his critics an extra month to lead a stronger assault on his budget proposal.

Cosentino is a former mayor of Auburn and can be contacted at cozguytho@aol.com