We’ll be talking about classroom cuts and threatened hospital closures as Gov. Andrew Cuomo builds the case for his budget over the coming months, but not whether you should be able to buy wine in grocery stores.

Or will we?

The proposal, included by Gov. David Paterson in his executive budget proposals for the last two years was missing from Cuomo’s draft spending plan, unveiled Tuesday. However, it remains alive in the minds of legislators loathe to enact cuts as steep as Cuomo proposed.

“I think it’s high time we had this conversation,” said Assemblyman Joe Morelle, D-Rochester. “It certainly is not an insignificant amount of money, so as people are potentially looking for ways to grow us out of this and meet some of the human service needs we have to meet, it’s a way to do it without raising taxes.”

A coalition of grocers and big wineries, with the sunny name New Yorkers for Economic Growth and Open Markets, said “hundreds of millions” could be raised quickly this year by selling licenses to grocery stores. As well, an increase in wine says would bring in additional sales tax. Paterson proposed the idea in the 2010-11 budget, projecting it would generate $93 million.

As Morelle pointed out, it’s not a tax — forbidden by Cuomo.

Expanding venues for wine sales is among several revenue boosting ideas that have been kicked around in recent years, like legalizing mixed-martial arts and taxing the tickets, or expanding opportunities for lottery and gaming operations.

Veterans of the budget process say the absence of such proposals makes them bargaining chips as Cuomo negotiates his spending plan with legislators.

“There’s a strategic element to this: if you don’t put up things like wine-in-grocery-stores, you give them the opportunity to restore some of the cuts,” said E.J. McMahon, a senior fellow at The Empire Center, a conservative Albany-based think tank. “It’s not like Cuomo didn’t read the paper last year or that the Budget Division isn’t aware of this as an option.”

Assemblyman Jack McEneny, D-Albany, said this has “always been part of the process. Repeated governors have said, if you don’t like a cut, you’ll have to find something to put it back.” Such ideas — or a tax on sugary beverages, or cigarettes, or plastic bags, or … — usually come in the eleventh hour of budget negotiations.

McEneny was principally concerned about Cuomo’s call for $450 million in negotiated savings from public employee unions, which could result in as many as 9,800 layoffs.

Many Assembly Democrats, including Majority Leader Ron Canestrari, D-Cohoes, called on Cuomo to renew an income tax surcharge for individuals making more than $200,000 a year. This would bring in an additional $1 billion this year and $4 billion next year. The deficit is $10 billion.

Cuomo, a Democrat, is against the proposal, which has earned him support from business and real estate groups. Assemblyman Jonathan Bing, a Democrat representing a wealthy area of Manhattan, also opposes the tax, but says New York should host mixed-martial arts matches — in which combatants punch, kick, or attack each other with less regulation than boxing bouts. It was proposed last year with a projected $2.1 million benefit.

“Certainly, I think it’s not the silver bullet that will close the budget gap, but right now New York is shipping money to neighboring states that it could be using for restorations to health and education programs,” he said.

McMahon said he read Cuomo as “agnostic” on these proposals. When asked for the governor’s opinion, his spokesman Josh Vlasto offered neither rebuke nor endorsement, saying only, “what is included in the budget is what is included in the budget.”

Items like this are also far more tangible for average citizens than budget-ese discussions about tweaking “rebasing rates” for hospitals in public discussions of the budget. By omitting them, Cuomo can more easily drive debate toward the need to cut “unsustainable” levels of spending.

There are special interests on every side of every proposal — including wine in grocery stores. Michael McKeon, a spokesman for the Last Store on Main Street coalition of liquor stores and small wineries, said “I think the governor recognized that it’s a bad idea that’s going to hurt small businesses, hurt small wineries and encourage underage drinking.”

“I think this thing is buried,” he said. “Without the governor’s support on it, the Legislature opposed to it twice last year, I don’t see it having much life.”

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