Cuomo and Legislative Leaders Strike Deal on New Ethics Rules By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and THOMAS KAPLAN Published: June 3, 2011
In the wake of scandals that have felled two New York governors and multiple state lawmakers, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and leaders of the Legislature announced an agreement on Friday to overhaul the state’s ethics laws as part of an effort to stem corruption and misconduct in Albany.
The agreement would force legislators, many of whom have part-time law practices, to disclose the names of clients who have business before the state; would allow prosecutors to seek to strip pensions from future elected officials convicted of felonies; and would for the first time allow officials appointed by a governor a role in overseeing legislative compliance with ethics laws.
“Government does not work without the trust of the people,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement. “And this ethics overhaul is an important step in restoring that trust.”
The agreement followed months of tortuous negotiations conducted in secret. The governor, who has made overhauling ethics rules a priority, tried to pressure the Legislature by traveling the state with a PowerPoint presentation listing the names of lawmakers charged with corruption; two continue to serve and will be eligible to vote on ethics changes even while awaiting trial.
Mr. Cuomo had repeatedly warned that if the Legislature did not agree to revise ethics rules, he would use a century-old law known as the Moreland Act to appoint an investigative commission charged with ferreting out legislative abuses.
Government watchdog groups were guardedly optimistic about the ethics overhaul after being allowed to inspect a draft agreement.
“It’s novel and untested, but promises to be a success because of its different approach,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union. “For there now to be external oversight of the State Legislature by a separate body is significant.”
The agreement is to be announced on Monday in Albany, but the governor and legislative leaders issued a joint statement on Friday describing the details. If approved by the Legislature, the agreement would be the second major overhaul of the state’s ethics enforcement apparatus in the last four years, and would create a joint ethics commission with oversight over both the executive and legislative branches.
“Time will tell,” said Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “There are no guarantees. But it is better than what we have now.”
The commission would include six people appointed by a governor, split between Democrats and Republicans. In addition, the majority leaders of both legislative houses would make three appointments each, and the minority leaders would each make one.
In a concession to Republican concerns that Democrats would use the commission for partisan purposes, the structure of the new commission gives de facto veto power to the appointees of the Assembly speaker... ...................... INSERT: the appointees of the Assembly speaker? I don't see he/she has any. Must be missing something .. please .. ?? ...................... and the Senate majority leader to block investigations of sitting lawmakers. And if the commission voted against pursuing a complaint, that decision would remain secret — as would any vote to block a public finding of wrongdoing after an investigation.
To help insulate appointees from political influence, board members will serve five-year terms. No member may be a lawmaker, senior state official or lobbyist.
In addition to requiring lawmakers to disclose their own clients, the state will create a public database of people or firms who represent private interests before state agencies. The new disclosure is intended to allow closer public scrutiny of firms that employ lawmakers, even in cases where the lawmakers do not personally represent clients before state agencies.
The State Senate leader, Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican, and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, are paid for part-time work at large law firms; both men say they do not personally represent any clients with business before the state, but partners at Mr. Skelos’s firm do represent such clients.
The deal gives Mr. Cuomo another victory, on top of his successful budget negotiation and his brokering of a pact to cap property taxes. But it does not accomplish another of his goals: to improve the state’s campaign finance laws, widely criticized by government watchdog groups as outdated, weakly enforced and overly permeable.
The last round of ethics improvements was won in 2007 by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, who persuaded the Legislature to enact a ban on gifts to public officials and new limits on lobbying for former public officials. But that agreement left largely intact a system under which the lawmakers police themselves with a Legislative Ethics Commission appointed by legislative leaders.
The Legislative Ethics Commission has acted only once against a sitting law maker — on Tuesday, when it criticized an Assembly Democrat, William F. Boyland Jr. of Brooklyn, who had already been charged with corruption by federal prosecutors.
In recent years, at least nine state lawmakers have been indicted or convicted of bribery, fraud or other crimes committed while they were in office.
They included former State Senator Pedro Espada Jr., a Bronx Democrat indicted last year on charges of stealing from a network of nonprofit health care clinics, and Joseph L. Bruno, an upstate Republican and former Senate majority leader convicted of illegally concealing payments made to him by businesses seeking help in the Legislature. Mr. Bruno is appealing his conviction.
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