Starving NY lawmakers resort to eating corndogs amid late-budget pay freeze

What they should be hungry for is a budget deal.

Albany pols who are more than two weeks late in putting out the state budget — and therefore about to miss a second paycheck — were so famished Wednesday they resorted to eating carnival food instead of their usual fancy fare.

State senators and assembly members who might normally be chowing down on a $470 steak down the street had to stoop to the level of accepting Sonic corn dogs graciously handed out by The Post from its office in the Capitol on Wednesday.

“Can you imagine that’s what we’re living on? Corndogs!” Assemblyman Tony Simone (D-Manhattan) chuckled as he bolted back toward the Assembly chamber.

“Don’t tell my wife,” quipped state Sen. Jim Tedisco (R-Saratoga) after being cajoled into grabbing a dog.

“They sell these at fairs and stuff, we don’t have that in the city!,” Assemblywoman Marcela Mitaynes (D-Brooklyn) remarked to The Post before trying her first-ever corndog.

“Are they vegan?” Assemblyman Harvey Epstein (D-Manhattan) asked before politely declining.

In 1998, then-Gov. George Pataki, the last Republican elected to statewide office, demanded legislators agree to temporarily forgo their pay while the state budget was late.

Despite Pataki’s best intentions, some of Albany’s elected fat cats are now so loaded that one or two missed paychecks don’t seem to be a big deal to them.

New York lawmakers are the highest paid state legislators in the country – reeling in a cool $142,000 a year even though they’re only scheduled to be in Albany for 61 days this year.

On top of that, many of the pols have additional sources of income, some pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars on top of their taxpayer-funded six-figure salaries.

The legislators voted to give themselves a raise in a special session in late 2022 — but also agreed to cap how much outside income they could earn at 25% of their salary, or around $35,000, set to go into effect next year.

Withholding pay hasn’t appeared to push the legislature to hasten the pace of passing the purported $237 billion budget, with the state Senate gearing up to, once again, extend the deadline on Thursday as Albany is still starved for a deal.

The future cap on outside income won’t do much to foster timely budgets, either, good government groups said.

“I think the forces of Albany politics that lead to back-door negotiations and late budgets are stronger,” Rachel Fauss, Senior Policy Advisor at Reinvent Albany said. “This process doesn’t benefit the public so much as the special interests that have an easier time penetrating this opaque period of budget adoption.”

Reinvent Albany along with fellow good government groups and New York Public Interest Group and Common Cause NY, have argued for years that the cap should be set at 15% of income.

“Lawmakers cannot serve two masters, their focus should be on the needs of their constituents and nothing else,” Blair Horner, Legislative Director of NYPIRG, told The Post.

“I don’t think the outside income restriction will impact next year’s budget,” he added.