Today in your Trail Mix:
Budget predictions and prognostications.
Schumer on high speed rail.
The New York Times on Kodak.
And drillers on local fracking bans.
Budget
Today's the day that Governor Andrew Cuomo delivers his budget address, at 2 p.m. - and naturally, the predictions and precautions about what he'll say are rolling in.
Gannett's Joseph Spector writes that Cuomo is "expected" to tap the political capital associated with a 73 percent favorability rating, to find savings in state worker pensions.
Michael Gormley at AP reports that the state comptroller says New York's economy is "still in a very sluggish period of recovery."
DiNapoli also says he wants a more transparent budget process, unlike last year's budget (Joseph Spector, Vote Up!).
Albany is on tenterhooks, hoping that a promised boost to the city's budget will come through (Jordan Carleo-Evangelist, Times Union).
The governor says he won't be adding more funding to the DEC to hire staff to regulate hydrofracking because you wouldn't do that "unless you believed you were going ahead with hydrofracking ... and we haven't made that determination" (Jon Campbell, Vote Up!).
Nick Reisman at Capital Tonight lays out a list of items to look for in the address.
You can watch the address here:
Infrastructure and technology
Senator Schumer will be in western New York today to call for high speed rail service between Buffalo and Albany (AP).
Schumer is also coaxing the Defense Department into striking a deal that could create 200 chip fabrication jobs in the Syracuse area (Ryan Delaney, WRVO/Innovation Trail).
Chip maker GlobalFoundries is the state's largest economic development project - but only about half of its 1,100 hires have come from New York State (Marie Cusick, WMHT/Innovation Trail).
A spokesman for Independent Power Producers talked about the governor's proposal to build an energy "superhighway" from Quebec to NYC on Capital Tonight [VIDEO] (Maureen McManus, State of Politics).
Mental health counselors are going door-to-door in the Southern Tier to assist flood victims with emotional recovery (Jennifer Micale, Press & Sun-Bulletin).
Kodak and Rochester
The New York Times discovers what everyone who lives in Rochester already knew - Kodak's decline hasn't shuttered the town completely (Peter Applebome).
And Sean Lahman at the Democrat and Chronicle steps to the plate to defend Rochester's workforce, arguing that the city isn't the reason that Kodak wasn't able to innovate its way out of its slump.
Case in point: Our latest Company Town profile, D.A. Smith & Associates, whose president, Del Smith, tells the Innovation Trail's Zack Seward that entrepreneurs "eat what you kill."
Energy
Drillers are decrying the possibility that local bans against fracking could stand, arguing that they would be "the kiss of death" for the natural gas industry in New York (Freeman Klopott and Jim Efstathiou Jr., Bloomberg).
PUSH Buffalo is hoping to make 300 homes more energy efficient in the next two years (Mark Sommer, Buffalo News).
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