In January of this year, then-Speaker of the Assembly Silver was arrested for his alleged abuse of power – using his official position to illegally obtain millions of dollars in outside income.  With thatarrest as a backdrop, in February Governor Cuomo organized a speech at New York University’s Law School to announce his ethics reform plan.  The governor had a number of options for addressing the central problems that contribute to New York’s ethical scandals, including: Read the rest of this entry »

THE GOVERNOR CUTS AN ETHICS DEAL WITH THE SPEAKER

Last week, Governor Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Heastie announced an agreement to strengthen New York’s ethics laws.  At that time, the governor touted the agreement as extraordinary, the “most stringent ethical policy in the United States of America.”

But no one really knows if the agreement is the best in the nation.  The only thing that has been disclosed about the details is in the governor’s news release.  No bill language was provided to the media or public.

However, the governor did disclose his proposals in his budget plan and he said that the agreement is consistent with those ideas.  Let’s take a look at what likely could be the best the public can expect in the governor-assembly agreement. Read the rest of this entry »

SUNSHINE WEEK AND GOV CUOMO’S 90-DAY EMAIL DELETION POLICY

Sunday marks the beginning of “Sunshine Week” a week in which the nation focuses its attention on government openness.  The “Week” makes it clear that it is important to maintain an open government, in order to ensure the proper relationship between public officials and the citizens they are pledged to serve.

The critical tool for holding policymakers accountable, as well as ensuring that the public is educated on policymaking, is the Freedom of Information Law.  The Law operates on one basic concept – that government information should be accessible to the public.  Without a strong open access law, it is virtually impossible for the public to adequately participate in, and monitor, governmental decision making.

Unfortunately, in Albany, a very dark cloud persists: The Cuomo Administration’s policy of requiring the elimination of emails after 90 days. Read the rest of this entry »

The pace is picking up at the state Capitol.  The budget is scheduled to be approved by April 1^st.  In order to meet that deadline, the state Senate and the state Assembly are likely to advance their own one-house budget plans this upcoming week.  A week after that, both houses should begin a joint conference committee process to work out their differences while they negotiate with the governor.

There are big issues to be addressed – from ethics to education.  But there are a number of other issues that have not gotten attention and that, if enacted as proposed by the governor, would cause real problems for New Yorkers.  Here are three of them.

1.Breast cancer screening.  The governor proposes, once again, to combine a number of public health programs, and then slash the funding for them by a whopping 15%.  One of those programs is the state’s Cancer Services Program.  The CSP provides free cancer screening for New Yorkers who lack health coverage.

The single largest number of cancer screens is mammography (the program also covers colon and cervical cancer screenings).  It is also one of the biggest programs on the governor’s chopping block.

2.  Tuition Assistance Program (TAP).  The governor’s plan says that unless the legislature approves college financial aid for undocumented immigrants and tax credits for students attending private and parochial schools, there will be no money in the budget for TAP.

TAP is the state’s largest college financial aid program.  Its maximum award is $5,165 for the state’s lowest income college students.

But the governor is proposing to eliminate funding for TAP unless the legislature approves the proposals for financial aid for undocumented immigrants and tuition tax credits.   You heard that correctly, under the governor’s budget proposal there is a possibility that the TAP financial aid will be completely eliminated.  All $1 billion in aid for over 300,000 New York college student recipients is at risk.

It is mystifying why the governor would put such a popular – and necessary – program at risk, but he has.

3. Environmental Protection Fund.  Created by the state legislature in 1993, the Environmental Protection Fund is a source of funding for environmental projects.  Some examples of projects that the EPF funds are: purchasing land for the NYS Forest Preserve, restoring historic sites, conserving farmland, controlling invasive species, upgrading municipal sewage treatment plants, and paying for recycling programs.

The EPF not only has significant environmental benefits, it has a positive economic impact as well.  A 2012 study by the Trust for Public Land showed that for every $1 invested in land and water conservation through the EPF, the state received $7 in economic return.

The EPF once received $255 million and was scheduled to increase to $300 million before the economic recession occurred.  The EPF is currently funded at $162 million.

The governor proposes to increase that funding by $10 million, but he does so by taking revenues generated by the state’s program to regulate its greenhouse gases.The governor wants to divert $36 million of the revenues normally used to help reduce air pollution that causes global warming and use some of it for EPF.

These are some of the disturbing elements of the governor’s budget plan: Cuts to public health programs – including free breast cancer screening for the uninsured; political brinkmanship that puts at risk $1 billion of college financial aid; and, an environmental plan to “rob Peter to pay Paul” by increasing environmental spending by stealing it from a greenhouse gas reduction program.

As the legislature begins its part of the budgetary deliberations, it must reject the governor’s three big mistakes and instead improve these programs – not hurt them.

Two years ago, Governor Cuomo unveiled a new government portal called “open.ny.gov.”  At that time the governor proclaimed, “”This new website will dramatically increase public access to one of our most valuable assets – data. As it expands and evolves over time, open.ny.gov will spark innovation, improve efficiency, promote accountability, and bring the people back into government.”

Fast forward to last week and the governor was under siege for his program to purge from the state email system all electronic correspondence that was over 90 days old.  How can the Administration reconcile moving so dramatically from proudly promising openness to undermining it?

Ironically, as the state was unveiling its open.ny.gov, it was quietly implementing a policy to delete all of the emails of all state workers.  What provoked the media’s interest last week was an internal memo that surfaced outlining the policy.  The logic, according to the governor’s office,was that as the state consolidated its older computer systems to a new cloud-based system, the 90-day deletion policy was put into place for the entire new system.

The state’s new system purges deleted mail after 90 days and makes sure that mail “cannot be recovered.” The Cuomo Administration document says that all mail — whether manually deleted or not — “will be subject to the 90 day retention policy.”

The state’s policy requires employees to manually retain emails that are the subjects of FOIL requests or are necessary for litigation.  Of course, how will government workers know if such emails are necessary for litigation before the 90 day deadline?  Unless the litigation has already been filed, they probably won’t.

The Cuomo Administration announced that mass purging of email records is beginning across several state government agencies. The governor’s chief information officer argued that the email purge was a cost-saving measure aimed at “making government work better.”

But the move seems designed to hide information.

New York’s contract with Microsoft, which runs the new cloud-based system, allows each employee to have 50 gigabits of email storage. The storage is enough to handle 30 years” worth of messages.

Cuomo’s new policy stands in contrast to the federal government’s, which mandates that emails be retained for three to seven years. Starting in 2015, the emails of federal employees will be saved for at least seven years, and executive staff emails will be saved indefinitely.  New York State can surely be as transparent as the federal government.

Government runs on email, and access to email and other electronic records has become a cornerstone of public accountability and transparency.  The Cuomo policy of using centralized software to automatically delete state employee emails after 90 days is resulting in the destruction of emails, which are considered public records under New York’s Freedom of Information Law.

It’s been said, “90% of government emails are junk.” But under theCuomo Administration’s 90-day email destruction policy, how does the public know whether the 10% of emails that are supposed to be saved are being saved? And, what can be done if they are not?

New Yorkers should demand that the Cuomo Administration end the automatic destruction of emails after 90 days, and instead take advantage of the state’s modern email technology by issuing a uniform policy of saving state emails for seven years.   If the Administration won’t budge, then the legislature should act by making it illegal to do so.