Albany”™s “pay to play” political culture and gerrymandered electoral districts that keep incumbents in office and the majority party in power contribute to an ethical crisis afflicting the state of New York, good-government advocates said recently in Westchester.
“There are two crises in the state,” Blair Horner, legislative director of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), told a Croton-on-Hudson audience at a forum on reforming state government hosted by Assemblywoman Sandy Galef, D-Ossining. “One”™s fiscal and the other ethical,” he said.
The state”™s ethical crisis has been caused in part by lax enforcement of already weak ethics standards and campaign finance and lobbying laws, he and other good-government advocates said.
The Senate and Assembly “have been extraordinarily reluctant” to strengthen enforcement of those laws, said Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the state League of Women Voters. The state”™s enforcement agency for campaign finance violations has only one investigator and a three-person office staff, she said. And Horner said the legislative ethics commission has never punished anyone in its more than 20 years of existence.
In Westchester, the state”™s fiscal crisis sparked the current Call to Action campaign led by the Westchester County Association. Speaking at the Croton roundtable, WCA Chairman Alfred B. DelBello called the state “literally insolvent”¦We owe more than we have.” Both immediate and long-term actions are needed, he said.
“What needs to be done today,” DelBello said, “is a hard and fast rule that there be no new taxes and no new borrowing.” Call to Action organizers are asking incumbents in the state Assembly and Senate and their challengers in the November election to sign a pledge to abide by that rule.
The state Capitol is routinely besieged by well-financed lobbyists, who outnumber state legislators by an 18-to1 ratio, said Horner. But the Capitol this year has been buffeted by a countersiege of reform-seeking groups and constituents. Established government watchdogs represented at the Westchester forum ”“ NYPIRG, the League of Women Voters of New York State, Common Cause New York and the Citizens Union of the City of New York ”“ have been joined in Albany by movements that include Call to Action and New York Uprising, whose public face and voice is former New York City Mayor Edward Koch.
“I really think at this point my colleagues are starting to think about reform in different ways than they have in the past,” Galef said.
One common spending practice in Albany ”“ the dispensing of member items or “pork” to constituent groups and organizations by members of the majority party ”“ is much in need of either reform or elimination, good-government leaders said.
Galef, who does not join in the practice, recently introduced an Assembly bill to reform member-item funding through oversight by state agencies, pre-certification by the state attorney general of groups wishing to receive the discretionary funds and equal sharing by all Senate and Assembly legislators of member item funds, which now are doled out disproportionately among legislative districts.
“I think we should not have member items at all,” Galef said, “but I think we”™re on a losing cause because it”™s just too hard to do this” for politicians who have long relied on dishing out pork to their constituents.
“It has been used to buy votes,” DelBello said of Albany”™s pork. Any good purpose served by the discretionary funding, such as support of local nonprofits, could be put through the state budget as a line item, he said.
“It has been misused,” Bartoletti said. “We are trying to get back to having member items for public purposes only and it should be accounted and it should be transparent.”
“Member items are a very, very small part of the problem,” DelBello said. He said larger, more difficult reforms of the public employee pension system and term limits for lawmakers are needed.
Horner said public campaign financing for campaigns would change Albany”™s “pay to play” system, which has a “pernicious” effect on elections and gives incumbents a vast advantage over challengers. The state”™s high limits on campaign contributions favor “the well-organized and the wealthy” and shut out small donors from access to legislators, he said. The number of New Yorkers making individual donations in the 2008 state election was less than the state”™s incarcerated population, Horner said.
