No wonder they have been hiding this for so long.. Truly incredible how they spend our money, the worst part is they all think it’s ok to do what they do.

Member Items Pork Projects Called ‘Tip of the Iceberg’ - December 7, 2006 - The New York Sun
Of the $52 million the Assembly has doled out this year from its declassified Community Projects Fund, Assemblyman Paul Tonko can take credit for but a modest slice, $130,000, which he has fed in morsels to fire departments, school districts, a cemetery association, and other groups in his Schenectady district.

Mr. Tonko’s gifts to his district didn’t end there, however. In late September, the Capital District YMCA boasted that Mr. Tonko, a Democrat, had secured a $1 million grant to help pay for a new building. Although the grant was more than seven times the size of Mr. Tonko’s share of the Community Projects Fund, even the most sharp-eyed fiscal analyst would be hard-pressed to spot it in the budget.

Buried among dozens of other capital projects totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s listed on page 226 of a mammoth “clean-up” budget bill that lawmakers passed before heading home in late June. Despite being the sponsor of the grant, Mr. Tonko isn’t mentioned in the line item; neither is the recipient, the YMCA. The bill simply lists $2 million for ” Schenectady Metroplex Redevelopment,” referring to the agency that handled the grant.

“Since it’s his project, folks know Paul asked for this,” a spokesman for the assemblyman, Tom Lynch, said. “He went to Ways and Means staff and the speaker to let them know it was important to him.”

The YMCA project is just one small example of pork barrel legislative spending that isn’t laid out in the budget but appropriated in lump sums that are locked away by the two men who control the Legislature, the Republican Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, and the Democratic Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver. They have steered a fraction of the money to their members for district grants and are sitting on untold millions, possibly more than $1 billion.