As the sun rose over the Capitol Saturday morning, state lawmakers put the finishing touches on the 2016 legislative session.\u00a0 Like all other end of sessions, this one wrapped up with a flurry of activity.\u00a0 Hundreds of bills were approved by both houses in a blur of legislative activities.<\/p>\n
Pending the governor\u2019s approval, New York State will have tougher anti-heroin laws, a new requirement to test for lead in schools\u2019 water, alcohol sales at Sunday morning brunches will be allowed, and online daily fantasy sports will be permitted.\u00a0 Legislative fights to allow ride-sharing companies like Uber, to expand outside New York City and greater access to medical marijuana, were shelved.<\/p>\n
What made this legislative session different than any other was that the shock from the corruption convictions of the two legislative leaders earlier this year was still loudly reverberating.\u00a0 When Governor Cuomo and state lawmakers were elected in November 2014, no one could have foreseen the looming changes.\u00a0 At that time, Assembly Speaker Silver looked like a lock to become the longest-serving Speaker and Majority Leader Skelos had once again engineered a Republican majority in the state Senate.<\/p>\n
Within months, those careers imploded and the issue of corruption moved to the policy front burner in Albany.\u00a0 No one had seen anything like it \u2013 and the calls for stronger ethics laws became widespread.\u00a0 The most recent polls showed that nearly 100 percent of New Yorkers thought that Albany had a serious ethics problem and wanted action.<\/p>\n
Yet, both houses of the Legislature seemed intent on advancing their own proposals \u2013 plans that did not match and thus could never become law.\u00a0 Only one person had the power to forge a deal \u2013 Governor Cuomo.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, after the budget passed, the governor remained strangely silent on the need for ethics reforms.\u00a0 Had he used his bully pulpit in the months of April and May, he may have been able to galvanize public support for a comprehensive ethics package.\u00a0 The governor has a pretty solid record of cajoling and arm twisting the Legislature when he wants to.\u00a0 He chose not to.<\/p>\n
Instead the governor waited until the last few weeks of session before advancing his reform plans.\u00a0 He also chose to negotiate with the legislative leaders behind closed doors, a tactic that further deprived reforms of the necessary public support needed to succeed.<\/p>\n
At 6:45 p.m. Friday night, the governor announced a deal had been hammered out.\u00a0 The headline on his press release stated, \u201cGovernor Cuomo and Legislative Leaders Announce Agreement on 5 Point Ethics Reform Plan.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until seven hours later, at 1:45 a.m., that the actual bills were made public. \u00a0Public for the handful of lobbyists and political junkies paying close attention early on a Saturday morning, that is.\u00a0 A quick review made clear that the package was not<\/em> about ethics reforms.\u00a0 In fact, very little of the bill had anything to do with the recent corruption scandals or even public officials.<\/p>\n At the heart of the Silver and Skelos scandals were a network of limited liability companies \u2013 LLCs for short — that admitted to funneling $10 million in campaign contributions, with a cool $1 million to the governor himself.\u00a0 Were there any reforms of LLCs?\u00a0 Nope, instead the legislation targeted not-for-profits and charities \u2013 entities that played no role in either of the former legislative leaders\u2019 scandals.<\/p>\n Was there any campaign finance reform?\u00a0 Nothing meaningful on that topic either.\u00a0 Instead, the agreement offered an innovative way to better regulate Independent Expenditure campaigns run by so-called \u201cSuper PACs.\u201d\u00a0 But Super PACs play a relatively minor role in New York\u2019s campaign financing system \u2013 a role dwarfed by the LLCs.<\/p>\n And what did the package do about corruption?\u00a0 The plan advanced the first passage of a constitutional amendment to strip corrupt public officials of their pensions.\u00a0 In order for this to go into effect, a future legislature would have to approve it as well and then put it to the voters for their thumbs up. The quickest that could go into effect is January 1, 2018.<\/p>\n The plan contains reforms, for that there can be no doubt.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t ethics<\/em> reform.\u00a0 On that topic, Albany whiffed \u2013 in fact, it never even swung the bat.<\/p>\n Why then did the governor call it ethics reform?\u00a0 It is really a way for Albany\u2019s political elite to say they did something, when they did virtually nothing at all.\u00a0 And through the power of repetition, they hope that the public won\u2019t catch on.<\/p>\n Who knows, maybe it will work.\u00a0 But the member of the public who may matter most is the U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.\u00a0 He seems intent on digging into Albany\u2019s political system, which Bharara has described as a \u201cculture of corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n If Albany ever cleans up its act it will come as the result of his efforts, unfortunately not from the works of the state\u2019s elected officials<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the sun rose over the Capitol Saturday morning, state lawmakers put the finishing touches on the 2016 legislative session.\u00a0 Like all other end of sessions, this one wrapped up with a flurry of activity.\u00a0 Hundreds of bills were approved by both houses in a blur of legislative activities. Pending the governor\u2019s approval, New York […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-1687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ethics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1688,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions\/1688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nypirg.org\/capitolperspective\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}