The Assembly on Thursday night gave final passage to a $141.3 billion state budget.

The fiscal plan would fund a stadium rehabilitation project for the Buffalo Bills, keep aid to localities flat, sharply cut programs for developmentally disabled people, raise the minimum wage and authorize more than $2 billion in tax breaks over five years for the film and television industry doing work in New York.

The new fiscal plan also cuts funding for a variety of public health programs, suspends driver’s licenses of people who owe the state at least $10,000 in back taxes and gives $350 checks to taxpayers with children and household incomes of between $40,000 and $300,000 – a check that will first be delivered in the fall of 2014 just prior to election day for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and lawmakers.

The Assembly finished passage of the budget shortly before midnight Thursday. This marks the third straight year the budget was adopted by the April 1 start of the new fiscal year.

But while timeliness was being hailed by Cuomo and lawmakers, fiscal watchdogs raised warning flags about a budget they say has misplaced priorities.

“This is not the new New York. This is the old New York,” said Assemblyman Tony Jordan, a Washington County Republican who railed against a budget that gives another $420 million in tax breaks in the coming year to the film and television industry, which is half of all the new business tax cuts approved in the 2013 budget.

E.J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank, said there is a sharp rise in raids of state authority funds to help fund the budget’s general fund, a $1 billion net increase in borrowing, a $2 billion net tax increase over the next five years, a pension borrowing plan for localities that he says merely pushes off current costs to future taxpayers and the “bald-face political move” of giving the $350 tax rebate checks during the fall 2014 elections.

He termed as “pretty indefensible” the $54 million in state funds to help renovate the Buffalo Bills stadium to keep them in Western New York – a funding pot that has gained increasing criticism statewide as the budget was coming together over the past couple weeks.

The Cuomo administration dismissed the criticisms and said when the next two years are looked at – instead of the longer term outlook taken by watchdogs – there will be a net decrease in overall taxes of $2 billion…..

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