Flexing their political muscle, over 7,000 Latinos from around New York State gathered last weekend in Albany for the 20th Somos El Futuro Legislative Conference.

As buses rolled into town, participants spent three days involved in varied workshops on government programs.

Topics on protecting seniors, furthering Latino business inerests, education, and legislative re-districting were discussed. Participants also found time to lobby legislators as well as listen to Governor Spitzer.

The 2007 edition of Somos El Futuro Legislative Conference set an attendance record. With over 3 million Latinos in New York City alone, the massive showing is helping to raise awareness of Latino interests to Albany lawmakers. These issues also increase the public interest in the work of the New York State Assembly Puerto Rican/ Hispanic Task Force, says Assemblyman Peter Rivera, Democrat from the Bronx. One of the highlights of the task force’s work, says Rivera “has been to dramatically increase college student success for the hundreds of thousands students attending our CUNY and SUNY campuses. The time has come to begin the redirecting of aid to our public colleges and universities, where these funds are needed the most.”

Legislation was recently introduced to divert some funds away from wealthy private colleges and spend it on public higher education schools.

According to Assemblyman Luis M. Diaz, chair of the New York State Assembly Task Force on New Americans, “For more than a decade, the physical condition of many of our public colleges has been decaying. There is a large-scale reliance on part-time faculty and there has been an inability to meet the academic needs of huge numbers of struggling students. This situation has created a condition that threatens the viability of these colleges and our state. We must begin to redirect public money away from private colleges to meet these challenges.”

According to Hispanic lawmakers, private colleges receive hundreds of millions of dollars of state funding every year. This money is a subsidy for private colleges that is not completely needed. Many of these colleges have multi-billion dollar endowments and regularly receive large gifts from wealthy donors, while charging extremely high tuitions that are also subsidized by part of the $874 million state Tuition Assistance Program (TAP).

According to lawmakers, over the past few weeks alone, Cornell University launched a $4 billion fund drive; New York University has launched a million dollar per day fund drive, and Columbia University received a gift of $600 million.

“Neither the CUNY nor SUNY systems have the capacity to launch such fund drives. Neither has wealthy donors annually contributing millions, and neither can rely on exorbitant tuitions to fulfill their mission to educate the masses,” stated Rivera.

The proposed law will, over a period of five years, phaseout Bundy Aid. Each year the percent of the phase-out will be reinvested in public colleges and universities of the SUNY and CUNY system.

“This legislation is a perfect example of an excellent idea that needs to be acted upon. The strength of our local economies and the future of our shrinking middle-class demands that we use public funds to strengthen public institutions,” Rivera added.