Worries about New York's power center shifting to the Big Apple were more acute than usual Wednesday after Democrats won a slim majority in the state Senate. Led by three New York City natives, the party would command the governor's office, Assembly and Senate for the first time since the 1930s New Deal.

Downstaters think "only of what's going on down in their neck of the woods and have little regard for the impositions that they place on us," said Buffalo developer Carl Paladino, a frequent critic of state government.

Gov. David Paterson represented Harlem for 20 years in the Senate before landing in the governor's mansion this year. Manhattan's Sheldon Silver has been Assembly speaker since 1994. And Malcolm Smith of Queens, provided he keeps his caucus unified, is poised to become the new majority leader in the Senate in January.

As usual with New York's regional divisions, upstate reactions revolve around economics — especially the extra difficulties of finding good jobs in faded manufacturing hubs from Binghamton to Buffalo or, more so, in the small towns and agricultural hinterland stretching from the Southern Tier to the North Country.

"It shouldn't be allowed," griped Russo, 42, who works for a home security firm in Syracuse. "There should be a rule or a law that upstate and downstate have to share leadership positions. Monopolies usually lead to abuses of power. When you add politics to that mix, I think you're asking for trouble."

"Look at the job situation upstate," Russo said. "It's been bad here for years but Albany doesn't do anything about it. If New York City had the same problem, I bet they'd find a way to fix it pretty quick."

Under Albany's topdown system, leaders of the majorities control which communities get millions, which businesses get tax breaks, even which bills get debated. Newly departed Republican Senate leader Joseph Bruno played the system extremely well, steering pork by the barrel to his Albany-area district.

"You could see the writing on the wall, and I think that's why Bruno left," said June Howard, a retired teacher in Albany. "I think we've seen the last of any kind of prosperity up north and out west. It'll all be in New York."

Tensions become especially jagged at budget time, when upstate lawmakers have often formed alliances with Long Island counterparts to muscle school-spending spoils on a par with aid to New York City schools.

"A lot of upstate and small-town districts fear the Legislature looks awfully downstate," said Doug Muzzio, a public affairs professor at Baruch College in Manhattan. "There is the fear and also the expectation that you will have a shifting of priorities to those folks — while people in New York City would see this as a plus."

In Mark Wilcove's ideal political world, there would always be a carefully engineered balance of viewpoints represented in the actions of state government.

"I believe that people have an obligation to other people in the community and, as such, I would lean toward policies that support that," said Wilcove, 50, a technical writer and registered independent in suburban Rochester who associates Albany with super-partisanship, cronyism and "an utter lack of transparency."

No matter who rules the roost, he said in disgust, state lawmakers vote along party and even geographic lines "rather than voting on the issue."

Gerald Benjamin, a political scientist and dean at the State University of New York, New Paltz, said the Senate's Republican majority was New York's "upstate and Long Island voice."

But Smith, the Senate Democratic leader, has given greater attention to upstate concerns in recent years. He formed an upstate caucus within his delegation to draw up laws and programs to help those lawmakers' regions, proposed revamping economic development programs aimed at upstate to make them more effective and sought the hardest cap on property tax growth.

"Just because it's Democratic controlled doesn't mean it's liberal control," said Steven Greenberg of the Siena College poll, noting that a narrow Senate Democratic majority can't afford to lose any upstate Democrats.

Democrats clearly know the potential power of an upstate vote. Brooklyn-born Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer and Westchester County resident Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton often travel upstate to talk about the likes of apples, dairy farming and rural truck traffic.