For over a decade the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) has been the state’s leading ethics watchdog agency.  Its job is to oversee compliance with ethics standards set for the executive branch, in a limited way to do the same for the legislative branch, and to regulate state and local lobbyists and their clients.  Since its inception critics have charged that the structure of the agency is not independent and it is, in fact, a political agency – one in which the leaders of the executive and legislative branches controlled the actions of the agency.

This week, the state Senate’s Ethics Committee will hold a hearing to examine the work of New York’s ethics watchdogs. 

Unfortunately, the evidence has borne out those criticisms.  While the activities of JCOPE have been shrouded in secrecy (largely the result of state laws), reporting by investigative journalists has shed light on this critically important agency.  And the picture that emerges is deeply troubling.  The hard work of digging into JCOPE has been led by the Albany’s Times Union newspaper, which has devoted considerable resources into getting under the hood of JCOPE to see how it operates.  What little the public knows of JCOPE’s inner workings has been through the media, primarily the Times Union.

One issue currently under JCOPE’s consideration is examining the use of public resources for private gain.  Both of Governor Cuomo’s book deals were approved by the JCOPE staff without, it appears, full Commission approval.  It has been reported that some commissioners now believe that such approval should have gone to the full Commission. 

In both cases, the governor’s office argued that there was precedent for staff to decide the issue without going to the full board that directs JCOPE.  In both cases, the governor’s book deals resulted in significant compensation.  How the staff made their decisions and whether they were aware of all the details of the size of the financial compensation is not at all clear. 

Moreover, when the Executive Chamber’s employees requested approval on behalf of the governor, the correspondence was written on state letterhead and may have been written by a government employee working on public time.  These facts raise questions about where JCOPE draws the line in determining when the use of public resources is appropriate and when it is not. 

JCOPE has been criticized from within as well.  Members of the JCOPE board have alleged that the governor was told of the private discussions about allegations that a former top aide to the governor misused public resources.  Under state law, those discussions are supposed to be secret.  As of today, no one is aware of how the governor and his staff were alerted to these internal discussions.

There have been public complaints made by commissioners that JCOPE’s decision-making hinges on a small number of commissioners working with senior staff.  Again, it is not clear if this is true. 

This week’s state Senate’s hearing should be the place were these – and other – questions get raised and answered by JCOPE officials.  The new Executive Director of JCOPE will testify at that hearing, but it is not clear if the Senate plans on interviewing other members of the Commission or the senior-level staff.

Since the public pays for the ethics agency, they should have a right to know if any of these allegations are true.  The public deserves to get a better understanding of how ethics enforcement works – or doesn’t work – in New York.

Of course, the structure of the agency is the root problem: Commissioners appointed directly by the governor and the Legislative leaders – the very people whose ethical behavior could be questioned.

That simply cannot work.

That’s what government watchdogs and a New York City Bar Association review concluded.  The Joint Commission on Public Ethics (and the Legislative Ethics Commission) should be replaced with an independent ethics enforcement agency that would monitor and enforce ethics for the executive and legislative branches. 

Nowhere is the public’s trust more susceptible to harm than when lawmakers act in ways that skirt not only the letter, but also the spirit, of ethics laws.  New York has seen its share of ethical lapses, yet little has been done.  Prison sentences, convictions, plea deals, scandals and other allegations of ethical misconduct have been on the front pages of the state’s newspapers far too often.  As a result, the ways in which the state regulates political ethics has been a front-burner issue. 

Unfortunately, little is clear when it comes to New York State’s ethics laws.  The laws are riddled with loopholes and poorly – if at all – enforced.  Changes are needed to comprehensively reform the state’s ethics laws.  Let’s hope that the Senate uses its powers to get important questions answered and begins to develop reforms that will both ensure independent, competent ethical oversight and bolster public confidence in state government.

In New York City’s recent primary a new system of voting was implemented: ranked choice voting (RCV).  RCV allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, instead of limiting their decision to one candidate.  The new system was put in place after New York City voters overwhelmingly approved it (73.5%) for municipal and primary elections in 2019.  RCV is rare in the U.S., existing in several municipalities as well as in the states of Maine and Alaska.

Here’s how the NYC RCV system works:  Voters can choose to list up to five candidates in descending preference.  The New York City Board of Elections (BOE) then tabulates the votes.  A candidate who receives more than 50% of the vote wins.  If no candidate exceeds 50% in the first round of voting, counting continues.  In the second round, the candidate who received the fewest votes is dropped from consideration and that candidate’s votes are applied to the remaining candidates.  For the voters whose candidate was eliminated, their votes are redistributed based on their second choices.  If no candidate still garners 50%, then a third round is calculated, eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes, and redistributing those votes to the remaining candidates.  The process continues until one candidate’s vote count exceeds 50%.   

Proponents of the new system successfully argued that RCV gives voters more choices, that candidates are more likely to cooperate since they would not want to alienate other candidates’ voters.  Why?  Because if they are not a voter’s first preference they would want to be listed as a second or third choice since that may still help them to win the election.  Lastly, proponents argued that the RCV system would save money.  Prior to this new system, if no citywide candidate received 40% of the vote, a runoff election was held – and running elections costs money.

How did the new system perform?  There is good and bad news.  The good news is that despite fears it would be too complicated, New Yorkers overwhelmingly found it easy and straightforward to rank.  Primary turnout hit its highest levels in more than 20 years.  The mayoral race attracted a wide range of high-quality candidates, and quite a lot of media attention. The race was interesting because it was uncertain and competitive — and it was uncertain and competitive in large part because of ranked-choice voting.  Dynamic, competitive races lead to higher turnout. More voters are engaged, and more votes matter.

And according to a voter survey, New Yorkers liked the system.  In a survey jointly released by Common Cause/NY and Rank the Vote NYC, and based on exit polling conducted by Edison Research, 77% of New Yorkers want RCV in future local elections, 95% of voters found their ballot simple to complete, and 78% said they understood RCV extremely or very well.

On the negative side, the agency responsible for running the RCV election – New York City’s Board of Elections – has so far done a poor job.  The City’s BOE, which was established decades ago, has been long criticized as incompetent and too focused on the needs of the two major political parties, not the needs of voters.  The criticisms originate with the structure of the BOE. 

The NYC BOE – like all of the state’s local elections agencies – is run jointly by the two major political parties.  The commissioners are usually chosen due to their partisan loyalty, not their ability to competently run elections.  Of course, that does not mean that all elections commissioners and board staff cannot do a competent job – there are some that are quite skilled – but that the process of appointing them is far too likely to reward partisan loyalists. 

As a result of this system that rewards the party faithful – not necessarily what’s best for elections administration – polls across the state have been plagued with errors, incompetence, and too often illegalities.  New York City has not been immune.

For example, in 2016 the NYC BOE mistakenly purged 200,000 people from voting rolls, which led to some voters waiting in four-hour lines to cast their ballots.  In 2020, the BOE sent out 100,000 absentee ballots to voters, but with incorrect names and addresses.

In this year’s June Democratic primary, the BOE included 135,000 test ballots in the preliminary unofficial release of ranked-choice voting results.  After the error was identified, the BOE took down the faulty tabulations.  But the damage was done – giving RCV opponents an excuse to criticize the new system itself and cast doubt on the election results.

Of course, the BOE error in reporting the preliminary count has nothing to do with RCV.  BOE’s mistake was the result of human error.  It’s incomprehensibly incompetent, but it’s not a failure of RCV. 

New Yorkers are still waiting for the final results of the June Democratic primary election – absentee ballots still need to be counted and those RCV votes tabulated.  But until then, and despite the underwhelming performance of the NYC BOE, ranked-choice voting has passed its first test – City voters liked it, it reduced elections costs, and may even have begun to move toward a less toxic election cycle.  For other municipalities with run-off elections, it serves as a positive option. 

Last week, western North America suffered through a record-breaking heat wave.  In the month of June, nearly 90 percent of the western US was in a state of drought made worse by climate change.  Lakes have been at historically low levels and restrictions were imposed on water use across the region.  Canada is getting hit too.  As one Canadian climatologist commented, “I like to break a record, but this is like shattering and pulverizing them.  It’s warmer in parts of western Canada than in Dubai.”

Records being set in the western United States are equally impressive.  For example, Phoenix hit a record-breaking 118 degrees last week.  Tacoma Washington hit triple digits for only the third time since 1945.  CBS News described it as “Pacific Northwest bakes under once in a millennium heat dome.”

Alarmingly, according to the world’s experts, the worst is yet to come. In a leaked draft report that became public last week, the world’s experts in climate change painted a devastating picture of what is to come unless aggressive actions are immediately undertaken.  The draft report, prepared by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, predicted that millions of people worldwide are in for a disastrous future of hunger, drought, disease, and massive dislocation. 

According to media outlets, the report stated that “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.”  The report, due to be released in final form next year, predicted that “The worst is yet to come, affecting our children’s and grandchildren’s lives much more than our own.”

Even though it is well-known that global warming is fueling both the record heat and the growing droughts across the world, the IPCC draft report carried a punch.  The report makes clear that unless the world takes immediate actions, rising sea levels will threaten coastlines and major cities, many species of life on Earth will become extinct, and devastating heat waves will make parts of the world unlivable causing widespread famine and disease.

Action must be taken.

Here in New York, the state has set aggressive goals to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to shift power generation to non-fossil fuel sources.  In 2019, a state law was approved that established a road map for responding to the growing crisis by requiring:

• net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050;

• 70% of electricity be generated by renewable sources by 2030;

• new efficiency targets for reducing energy use in buildings; and,

• massive increases in the reliance of solar and wind power as well as a mandate to dramatically boost energy storage capacity.

While those are the types of goals that the world must adopt to avert a climate catastrophe, such a plan must have broad public support in order to succeed.  To build that support, these goals need to be in sync with the reality of the state’s performance, so that New Yorkers know the state is doing everything it can to protect their health and their future.

Unfortunately, New York has had a poor track record when it comes to matching its impressive rhetoric with its real performance.  For example, in 2009 New York set a goal of generating 45% of its power from solar and wind by the year 2015.  Today New York only gets approximately 5% of its electricity from wind and solar.

In order to build public support and to hold officials accountable, a monitoring system must be developed.  New York – and every government – should create an open, scientifically verifiable, “report card” that allows the public to understand how well government is doing in moving toward its climate goals.  For example, in New York, for the state to have 70% of its power generated by renewable sources in eight and a half years, it must show its annual movement in that direction.  New York currently generates 27% of its power from renewable sources (if hydropower is considered renewable).  Thus, the state must expand its reliance on alternative sources by approximately 5% annually.  How will New Yorkers know?

In the two years since it set its aggressive climate goals, it is still difficult for New Yorkers to discern what progress, if any, the state has made towards those goals, and how far it still needs to go.  NYPIRG recently released a review of the state’s goals and how far it has yet to go, but getting access to the data was difficult and incomplete.

The incomplete picture it painted was that New York is not on pace to achieve its goals.  With so much at stake, New York – and the world – must set significant climate protecting goals and establish a way for their performance to be measured. 

The ongoing ideological fight over whether the United States should ensure that all Americans have health care coverage came to a head last week with the US Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act.  While that decision rested on technical grounds – the Court ruled that the states and individuals bringing the challenge did not have legal standing to force a decision on the legal merits – it was widely viewed as a victory for the ACA law itself.

The Affordable Care Act – often called “Obamacare” – has now been law for a decade and has fundamentally changed health care delivery in the nation.  At the same time, the ACA has helped expand health insurance coverage to those most in need – individuals whose incomes were too high to obtain Medicaid coverage (health coverage for the poor and needy), yet too young to obtain coverage from Medicare (the universal health insurance system for those over the age of 65).

The morally reprehensible position of trying to take away health coverage from those covered by the ACA was made clear as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation.  Recklessly putting partisan and ideological interests ahead of the health of Americans is simply indefensible in normal times and particularly odious during a pandemic.

Simply put, lacking health insurance can be a death sentence.

Yet, the USA stands in stark contrast to the world’s developed nations.  All other wealthy nations have universal health coverage, although they organize their systems differently.  England, for example, has a national health service (NHS) that provides health care to all its residents.  Its government owns the hospitals and providers of NHS care, including ambulance services, mental health services, district nursing, and other community services.  Germany, on the other hand, has a more decentralized system, one that allows roles for its regional governments and a highly regulated private sector.

In all cases, however, the cost of health care delivery is less expensive than in America, and the life-expectancy in all these nations exceeds that of the USA.  The United States spends 17 percent of its Gross National Product on health care (pre-pandemic) yet ranks 28^th of the 37 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member nations in life expectancy. 

In short, citizens in those countries pay less and get more than Americans when it comes to health care.

That’s not to say that other nations’ health systems uniformly perform better that the American system – COVID vaccine rollouts have taken far more time outside of the US (and China).

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s decision should open a national debate over how best to proceed.  Assuming universal coverage is the goal, the United States still has a long way to go.  While the ACA expanded coverage to 20+ million Americans, nearly 30 million still lack health insurance of some form.

Vermont’s Senator Sanders is leading an effort in the Senate to include health coverage in the next round of the Congress’s budget reconciliation.  The Senator is pushing for changes that include a lowering of the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 60 and providing expanded coverage for those on Medicare – such as dental coverage.  Whether Sanders’s efforts will succeed is unclear, but that doesn’t mean that states should sit back.

The Affordable Care Act used the state of Massachusetts’s health insurance system as its model.  That plan, advanced during the tenure of Republican Governor Mitt Romney, required residents to get insurance, expanded Medicaid coverage to those whose incomes were close to – but not below – the poverty line, and offered government-organized health coverage with state subsidies for those middle-income residents who did not qualify for other programs or whose employers did not offer coverage.

Massachusetts now has near-universal coverage.  Over the past decade, New York State set up its own program and has seen a dramatic reduction in its uninsured. 

But there are still an estimated one million New Yorkers who lack coverage, with one quarter million lacking coverage due to their immigration status.  Given the fiscal limitations of expanding coverage – the state has been looking for ways to spend less on Medicaid for example – any expansion should be coupled with ways to rein-in costs.

One proposal with widespread legislative support (known as NY Health), is for New York to reorganize its health coverage system to squeeze out insurance industry costs and use those savings to fund a robust program of coverage.

Amid the worst acute public health crisis in generations, the current insurance system failed massively.  People lost their health insurance.  Hospitals and providers, operating with just-in-time systems and investments oriented to expensive treatments rather than public health, were less well equipped to absorb the pandemic demands than they should have been.  Ensuring coverage for all is one critical way that New York – and the nation – can help people who are sick, can reduce costs, and extend lifespans.  Those are benefits worthy of serious debate at both the federal and state levels.

Lawmakers wrapped up the 2021 legislative session last week.  In some ways, the session was unlike others.  For the entire January to June session the Capitol and the Legislative Office buildings were closed to the public.  Lawmakers did not have to be in Albany in order to vote.

But in other ways, the session was more like ones the occurred pre-pandemic.  The 2021 session saw a total of 892 bills pass, just shy of the 935 bills that passed in 2019 – and dramatically unlike last year’s passage of only 414 bills.

And like sessions of the past, a huge number of bills that were approved by the Legislature came during the final week:  461 of the 892 bills were approved last week. 

That return to some version of “typical” does not mean that the session was any more substantive.  Important issues were approved, for example, there will be five constitutional amendments on the ballot this November for voters to consider.  Two of those amendments will make voting easier – one eliminates the current requirement that voters need an excuse to obtain a mail-in ballot.  If approved by a majority of New Yorkers casting votes on the proposal that amendment will change the state Constitution to allow any voter to obtain a mail-in ballot merely by asking for one.

Another constitutional change would allow for new voters to register and vote on Election Day instead of the current blackout period that prohibits voters from registering within 10 days of Election Day.  

In the area of the environment, the Legislature approved a bill to require that the state establish regulations for some persistent toxic contaminants in drinking water supplies but did little when it came to tackling climate change.

One notable issue that lawmakers punted on was a bill that would have placed a moratorium on energy-intensive “cryptomining” in New York State.

Cryptomining is a relatively new technology that provides the basis for cryptocurrency.  Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are virtual currencies, which means they exist only online and there are no physical notes and coins.  Cryptocurrencies do not belong to a central bank, meaning they have no government backing.  They are international currencies and can be used to send money around the world without any identity checks, making them a popular choice for cybercriminals. 

These digital currencies require authentication to prevent fraudulent transactions.  One important way in which authentication occurs requires that the transaction be approved using a complex mathematical equation.  For the transaction to go through, crypto “miners” compete to solve the mathematical equation.  The first one to solve an equation authenticates the transaction and wins currency for their effort.

While it sounds like a science-fiction system, it is in use today.  The climate change component of this is that to solve these mathematical equations and to win the currency for their effort, these “miners” need incredible amounts of electricity to run their computers.  And the cheaper the source of power, the less overhead, and the larger the profit.

Crypotminers in New York are now considering turning on old fossil fuel energy plants to power their activities.  Firing up these old plants is cheaper yet contributes significantly to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions – at precisely the time that the world’s climate experts are arguing that we need to cut back.

The legislation would have put a hold on permitting the use of these mothballed plants until the state understood the climate (and freshwater) impacts.  The legislation was blocked in the Assembly.

While that is an example of an important bill that was waylaid by lobbyists, the number of bills passed in 2021 documents that one-party control has reversed an overall historical trend:  Since seizing control of the Senate, the Democratic majorities in both legislative houses have increased approval of legislation, reversing the previous decade’s overall decline and at the highest amounts over the past two decades (other than last year’s pandemic session).

Yet quantity is not necessarily quality.  The threat posed by the global warming resulting from the burning of oil, gas, and coal is an existential one.  It deserves attention.  No matter how seemingly productive lawmakers were, their collective failure to tackle climate threats outweighs by far the improvement in the number of bills passed.