It’s sure hard to tell that New York state has a budget deficit, isn’t it?

Chautauqua County is proposing to buy the 215 E. Third St., Jamestown, building it is using through a licensing agreement with GPatti LLC in the former Ray Nelson Service Station.

To be clear, the project being proposed does make sense. CARTS needs a permanent home. Business incubator space downtown has long been needed. Providing some sort of amenity to CARTS riders waiting for their bus would also be a nice addition. Chautauqua County has received a $160,000 grant from the state Transportation Department to buy the building. The improvements would likely come later.

The project is nice, but not timely in the least. Unless GPatti LLC issued an ultimatum that CARTS needed to leave the space, buying the temporary CARTS hub is certainly not a project that needs to happen this year.

Schools and service agencies are seeing state aid withheld and reimbursements denied, and the state is giving Chautauqua County $160,000 to buy a building that it could simply continue leasing for the foreseeable future. How can the state, with a straight face, tell schools they will have 20% of their aid withheld this year and then fund an unnecessary project like this? What sense does it make for one arm of the state government to pinch a penny so hard Abraham Lincoln’s eyes bulge while another arm of state government is throwing money around like a drunken sailor on shore leave?

To their credit, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Robert Mujica, state budget director, have made budget cuts over the past nine months to cut the state’s budget deficit. They have sat back and waited for a massive stimulus bill from the federal government to cover the rest of the deficit. That’s why the governor is constantly referring to the HEROES Act, with its $2.2 trillion price tag, in his news conferences and any other reference to inaction in Washington, D.C. But if the Problem Solvers’ Caucus stimulus bill, which will cost about $908 billion, is approved by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump, the bailout for New York state isn’t coming.

Is the CARTS hub project a nice thing to do? Absolutely. Is it necessary in the middle of a pandemic with a state budget deficit in the billions of dollars? Absolutely not.