The state budget adopted last week reauthorizes nearly 1,900 old pork projects, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo is poring over them for potential vetoes, an aide said.

Legislators added appropriations for the projects — totaling roughly $28.7 million, according to a Times Union analysis — to a 1,000-plus-page-budget bill that passed the Legislature last week. Called “community projects” or “member items” by legislators but derided by some critics as pork, most of the appropriations are for a few thousand dollars and were earmarked by a specific legislator.

They fund Little Leagues and the American Legion, fire departments and theater companies. The Albany Rural Cemetery is slated to receive $4,000; the College of Saint Rose is authorized for a $5,000 contract. There’s $100,000 earmarked for the town of Malta, site of the GlobalFoundries chip plant, and much larger, multimillion-dollar-size gobs of funds that have yet to be specifically obligated.

Assemblyman Denny Farrell, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs that chamber’s Ways & Means Committee, said the reappropriations were needed to fulfill ongoing contracts and already-promised funding.

“They’re not new member items — these are for old member items that are alive still,” said Farrell. “They’re programs where the money was going through but they had to make a correction and fell across the fiscal year.”

Indeed, funding for new member items fell out of the budget in 2009, a victim of the economic recession and a few high-profile cases where they were steered to benefit the family and friends of specific legislators. Cuomo, a Democrat who previously served as attorney general, has refused to sign off on new cash in budget negotiations, but after attempting to sweep clean the Community Projects Fund, from which member items are paid, seems content to let it trickle away. Appropriations give the state the authority to spend money, but they are not always backed by actual cash. As of last week, the Community Projects Fund contained $92.8 million, according to the state Division of Budget, the bulk of which is set aside for projects earmarked by Democrats who dominate the Assembly…..

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