Albany lawmakers under pressure to back anti-corruption law

Few things are as predictable in New York’s capitol as news of a legislator caught selling political favors for money. Since 2000, more than 30 state lawmakers have left office because of criminal or ethics violations, according to watchdog group Citizens Union.

New York leads the nation in corruption, with more than 2,500 federal public corruption convictions from 1976 to 2010, according to an analysis of Department of Justice data, placing it ahead of California and Illinois. This year, scandal has reached the very top of Albany’s leadership. Within months of each other, former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, the most powerful New York state politicians after Gov. Andrew Cuomo, were indicted on extortion, fraud and bribery charges.

A significant factor in Albany’s seemingly ingrained culture of corruption, many critics say, is a provision of New York law permitting legislators to earn outside income. “When you’re an elected official, you have an obligation to serve the public interest,” said Dick Dadey, the executive director of Citizens Union. “But when you’re also allowed to earn outside income, you serve a private interest — your own. That’s where corruption comes in.”

Responding to Albany’s unwillingness to tackle meaningful ethics reform, New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has submitted a bill that would bar earning outside income, challenging lawmakers to pass it before the current session ends on June 17. Citing “New York's long and inglorious history of public corruption” and describing past reform efforts as “one charade after another,” he called for sweeping changes to ethics rules.

In addition to a ban on outside income, his bill is a comprehensive proposal that would also limit campaign contribution amounts, create a public financing option for candidates and enhance the attorney general’s jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute corruption.

“This bill sends a very strong signal that the money spigot is going to stop,” said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York. “The legislature has managed to build a system that works very, very well for themselves and is not responsive to the ethics concerns of their constituents. And that’s got to change.”

Given that Albany politicians fought for years against even publicly disclosing their outside income — they weren’t required to do so until 2013 — getting the Schneiderman bill passed this year is seen even by many supporters as a long shot.

Lawmakers can earn very lucrative salaries from their outside work. In 2014, Silver listed $750,000 in income from a private law firm, dwarfing his state-paid salary of $116,000. Federal authorities claim the his disclosure fell far short of his actual outside earnings, however, charging that he received “nearly $4 million in corrupt payments” from two law firms over the last 15 years.  

At issue is just what services the lawmaker was providing to these firms to justify such outsize compensation. In his role as speaker, Silver controlled the legislative agenda in the Assembly and was one of Albany’s famed “three men in a room” who negotiated New York’s hundred-billion-dollar annual budgets behind closed doors. In the indictment, he is charged with receiving bribes and kickbacks from one law firm in exchange for referring companies with business before the state and collecting payments from a second firm for steering $500 million in state funds to one doctor’s medical research unit at New York Presbyterian–Columbia University Medical Center.

Some Albany politicians have taken advantage of outside employment in even more blatant ways, simply embezzling funds with impunity. In 2012 former state Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. was sentenced to five years in federal prison after being found guilty of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a nonprofit health care network he ran during his tenure as a legislator.

Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr. was tried not once but twice on a wide range of corruption allegations, including a no-show consulting job he was given by a hospital executive in exchange for promoting that company’s business interests in the legislature.

Good-government groups have been calling for limits on outside income for a long time. Blair Horner, the legislative director of the New York Public Interest Group doesn’t think an outright ban is necessary but said there should certainly be a cap on what’s allowed. “If someone’s making $15,000 on the side to be an adjunct professor at some college, I’m not so worried about that. But if they are a counsel to a firm and they’re making millions of dollars, giving strategic advice to people who have business before the government, I do care about that,” he said.

Ethics reform advocates point out that the vast majority of state legislators earn less than $20,000 in outside income. Yet attempts to enact a cap on outside earnings have repeatedly been met with resistance by the legislature. The problem, said Lerner, is simple. “The individuals who are earning substantial amounts in outside income are the people in leadership positions,” she said.

Horner agreed. “They tend to be in powerful positions within the legislature, and they tend to make a hell of a lot of money,” he said. “They don’t want to give up outside income.”

By proposing his ethics reform bill, the attorney general is betting that a high-profile stand against Albany corruption, combined with public outrage over never-ending scandals, will force lawmakers to address what he called “the parade of prosecutions” that has plagued Albany.

“We’re trying to root out corruption with this bill,” said Assemblyman Joseph Lentol, one of the bill’s sponsors, stressing that campaign finance reform is crucial in the fight against corruption. “Take the money out of politics.” 

Horner applauded Schneiderman’s effort but emphasized the need for meaningful enforcement. “Even if you have the laws, you need someone to enforce them that’s independent of the political elite in Albany,” he said. “And that doesn’t exist. The absence of an umpire means the game’s being played with no rules.”

The bill’s supporters acknowledge that just getting it on the legislative agenda will be difficult. The irony is that losing the long-standing leaders of the Assembly and Senate to corruption charges may actually make it more difficult for the bill to be considered before this legislative session ends. “We now have two relatively new leaders who are not likely to make major changes in the way we do business,” Lentol said. “I don’t think they’re going to make waves at the expense of their leadership by disappointing their [chamber] members.”

That doesn’t mean reform isn’t worth the effort. “We will never be able to force Albany’s hand unless we try,” said Dadey. “The legislature is weary of working on any additional ethics reforms this session but not nearly as much as New Yorkers are weary of legislative corruption.”