In past years, TV viewers have been bomarded with negative ads blasting a governor’s budget proposal for cutting funding here or not doing enough for children/the eldery/nurses or what have you.

Then Andrew Cuomo became governor and the Committee to Save New York, a consortium of pro-business groups, real estate interests and private-sector unions arrived on the scene to support his budget proposals and fiscal agenda.

Now it is the governor himself signing on to the airwaves to urge the on-time passage of his $142.6 billion spending plan that he touts as one that helps create jobs and doesn’t rely on tax increases to plug a $1.3 billion deficit.

The ad (you can view it here) was funded by the state Democratic Party, which had $217,396 in cash-on-hand, as reported by its most recent campaign-finance report filed with the Board of Elections.

As the Buffalo News’s Tom Precious reported when he broke the story about the ad campaign last week, the media buy is running into the six figures and is also paid for in part by Cuomo’s own 2014 re-election campaign.

The ad marks a more traditional move by a governor to promote his own budget. In 2007, then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer dipped into his own campaign account to fund a pro-budget TV commercial as did his successor, David Paterson.

Absent from the fray is the Committee to Save New York, whose donors the organization hasn’t made public, but under new lobbying guidelines may be required to.

Some of the group’s donors have leaked out anyway  — including gambling interests as well as the utility ConEd.

A lot of the debate in the early days of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics was how far back the new watchdog should go in requiring lobbying entities like the committee to disclosure their donors. In the end, JCOPE settled on a relatively narrow look-back period for dislcosure.

Cuomo is proposing a sweeping donor disclosure law, which he first detailed in his State of the State address.

The governor has kept Save New York at arm’s length and insisted there’s no co-ordination.

A complicating factor this year is Cuomo’s support for a minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $8.75 — a proposal that not everyone in the business community has embraced.

So where’s the Committeee to Save New York? They’re still around, though their registration to engage in lobbying activities in 2013 hasn’t posted on the website of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

“We have never been shy about letting the world know when we have something to say, and that hasn’t changed,” said spokesman Mike McKeon. “So when we are prepared to move, you will know about it.”

The group’s website, letsfixalbany.org, is currently down, which McKeon said was a temporary problem and will be fixed.

Update: The website back up and running.

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