Buffeted by lawmaker scandals, Cuomo unveils latest ethics reforms

Just weeks after a pair of deposed legislative leaders were found guilty in separate corruption trials, Gov. Andrew Cuomo rolled out an ambitious set of proposals aimed at finally following through on a pledge to clean up Albany.

Cuomo, who had already unveiled much of his 2016 agenda in recent days, kept the audience waiting until nearly the end of his State of the State speech on Wednesday to outline a detailed ethics reform plan. Among the governor’s proposals are several that good government groups had been pressing for, including campaign finance reform, closing of the “LLC loophole,” and limiting outside income for state lawmakers.

“We have proven competence, and we have proven we can make government work, but recent acts have undermined the public’s trust in government,” said Cuomo, calling ethics reform a “threshold issue.” “Public trust is essential for government to function at the level we need.”

The governor also reintroduced another proposal that would strip elected officials already in office of their state pensions when convicted of a felony, which both houses had agreed to last year but failed to advance due to conflicting bill language. Calls for pension forfeiture, which would require a constitutional amendment, have only increased with the convictions of Sheldon Silver, the former Assembly speaker, and Dean Skelos, the former state Senate majority leader, neither of whom lost their pensions.

“We must take state pensions from those convicted of a crime related to their government service,” Cuomo told the crowd on Wednesday. “Anything else shows disrespect to the rule of law and to the taxpayer.”

Among the governor’s other proposals were a voluntary public campaign financing system, a $25,000 contribution limit to housekeeping accounts and public disclosure of these donors’ identities. Housekeeping accounts currently have no donation limits, and while they are supposed to be used for non-campaign activities, critics say they are subject to abuse.

Under Cuomo’s plan, campaign contributions of any kind would also have to be disclosed more frequently.

What could be a bigger fight between the governor and legislative leaders is his call for limiting state legislator’s income to 15 percent of their base salary, even if he is offering something of a compromise. Some lawmakers want to go even further by banning income from outside jobs entirely, possibly in tandem with a pay raise and the switch from a part-time to a full-time legislature – especially in the wake of Silver’s trial, which revealed that the former Assembly speaker had earned millions of dollars in schemes involving no-show legal work in addition to his duties as an elected official.

After Cuomo’s speech, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Silver's successor, said he waiting to read the bill language before he makes a decision on whether or not his conference will support the cap on legislators’ outside pay, which is modeled on federal limits.

State Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan was more decisive, saying he didn’t think an outside income limit was a “good idea.”

“I think people should be entitled to earn an income,” Flanagan told reporters. “We haven’t had a raise in the legislature in 17 years. That, to me, is a problem. Now, that’s something that could change, as well. Those will all be a part of our discussions. I think having people with diverse backgrounds who have an understanding of the real world has an extraordinary inherent value.”

In another “comprehensive” reform, Cuomo called for extending the state’s Freedom of Information Law to the Legislature and applying both FOIL and the state’s open meetings law to the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics and the Legislative Ethics Commission. Additionally, he called for legislation that would increase JCOPE oversight of financial disclosure statements and an update of the state lobby law to cover consultants and people who work to procure state contracts.

The biggest question, as in past years, is how hard the governor will push and how successful he will be, given a history of opposition in the Legislature.

Republicans have long opposed public financing of campaigns, for example, especially if taxpayer dollars are used, and lawmakers from both parties have been slow to embrace other reforms.

Despite a seemingly unending series of corruption arrests and convictions plaguing the state Capitol, ethics reform is usually on the back burner. Silver's and Skelos’ arrests on federal corruption charges within months of each other during the 2015 legislative session put Albany’s “business as usual” way of operating under scrutiny by the public – and created political pressure on lawmakers to do something about it.

After U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara arrested Silver and then Skelos during the 2015 session, Cuomo vowed during budget negotiations not to approve any agreement that left out ethics reform. The budget agreement ultimately included some changes that would require lawmakers to disclose more about their outside income and campaign finance spending and per diem reform.

During budget negotiations last year Cuomo also proposed stripping the pensions of sitting lawmakers who are successfully convicted on corruption charges, but the effort ultimately stalled.

“Three years ago when I first introduced the proposal, the idea that the state Senate and the state Assembly would both pass pension forfeiture constitutional amendments was many miles away from being reality,” said Assemblyman David Buchwald, a Democrat. “Last year, both houses did that. The two bills are different. There’s work to be done to reconcile them.”

Flanagan said his conference is likely to vote on pension forfeiture again this year.

“We lived up to the agreement last year, the Assembly did not. We had a three-way agreement. We did it,” he said. “What was agreed upon last year, we stuck to, put it out and it went to a vote. I assume we will do that again.”

The overall 2015 ethics package prompted criticism from editorial boards, with one deeming the agreement “ethics lite.” Good government groups criticized the deal for not being comprehensive and riddled with loopholes.

“It’s hard to see how these changes in the law will have any meaningful effect on public corruption,” state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in an interview. “It appears to me these are not reforms that will have any significant effect on the sort of problems we are seeing in Albany today.”

Then, in the weeks leading up to this year’s State of the State and budget address, Cuomo vowed to again make ethics reform a priority.

“A year ago, at the beginning of the budget process the speaker of the Assembly was Sheldon Silver, the Senate majority leader was Dean Skelos and the deputy Senate majority leader was Tom Libous,” New York Public Interest Research Group Executive Director Blair Horner told City & State. “Fast forward to a year later, all of them have been convicted of corruption. If that’s not a wakeup call to the Legislature that they have to act, I don’t know what is.”

Horner said it will be important to see how JCOPE performs as the state’s ethical watchdog.

“The key thing in any reform effort is, you can have the best laws in the world, but if you don’t have a good enforcing agent or good implementing entity – it doesn’t work,” Horner said. “That’s critically important and while the governor talks a little bit about it in his book, we don’t know exactly what that means.”

Good government groups heralded Cuomo’s latest proposals, but offered differing opinions on the likelihood that the governor would follow through.

“This is a governor who was able to figure out how to get marriage equality done, even though there was a lot of opposition to that, so I think we’ll know soon enough how hard the governor is going to fight to make this happen,” Horner said. “If the governor pushes hard he can achieve historic changes in New York.”

But Barbara Bartoletti, the legislative director of the League of Women Voters of New York State, was more skeptical.

“On the area of reform, we’ve been advocating for these how many decades now?” Bartoletti asked. “We want to see that he does more than just say the words, that he actually uses his political capital, uses his bully pulpit, to actually make sure that in an election year – not his election year, the Legislature’s election year – he actually can get some of these reforms done.”