Maybe in a different time with different leadership and different lemmings, the special session of the Legislature called for Tuesday would be a watershed moment, a demarcation in time where lawmakers abandoned trivialities and their customary do-nothing attitude, and substituted an esprit de corps reflective of the urgency of our economic gloom. New Yorkers, disappointed time and again before, know better than to expect otherwise when the Assembly and Senate return to take up Gov. Paterson’s budget-cutting proposals. Quite frankly, there are only so many Eric DiBartolos to go around, and he isn’t in Albany.

DiBartolo, of apparent sound mind and body, is the Town of Yorktown highway superintendent who refused a $25,000 pay raise – the would-be spoils from a $21,000, one-time stipend, along with a 3 percent increase that all town elected officials were to receive in Supervisor Don Peters’ 2009 budget proposal. Why was DiBartolo being treated to such largess? The Town Board credited DiBartolo with saving the town as much as $800,000 through cost-cutting measures and departmental consolidations.

“In my heart I can’t turn around, in this day and age when people are getting laid off and tuitions are going up and everything that’s going on, I can’t take a raise,” DiBartolo told staff writer Brian J. Howard. Peters, all four Town Board members and Town Clerk Alice Roker also passed on raises, saving $8,000. Said DiBartolo, who gave up the most, “I just can’t do it.”

Perhaps New York could put him in charge of the Legislature, before it’s too late.

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