CityHallNews.com

Op-Ed:
New General, Same Battlefield
Albany dysfunction and corruption is deeply ingrained and dug in for a fight

By Robert Polner

The Empire State, which once paved the path to the New Deal, is perceived widely as a political backwater, whose most powerful statewide leaders make deals behind closed doors with barely a nod to regular democratic procedures found in many other statehouses, New York’s City Hall or the U.S. Congress.

Since the November elections, each week seems to shed new light on Albany decision-making processes calculated largely to protect the intractable Republican majority in the Senate and Democratic majority in the Assembly. The majority leader and Assembly speaker have been unwilling or unable to change their habits, despite outcries from editorial boards good government groups.

On Long Island, a one-time “iceberg” (in geological terms), where the nine Senate seats are held by Republicans, none changed hands, despite the blowout victories by Democratic ticket-toppers Eliot Spitzer and Hillary Clinton, the national shift in Congress, or the fact the majority of Congress and Assembly members on the Island had been and continue to be Democrats.

But then, the Senate and Assembly districts throughout the state have been gerrymandered for virtual lifetime incumbency.

Even 210 legislators ensconced in a legislature where lawmakers’ retirements or deaths-in-office outnumber the rare instances when voters drive them out must stay on the good side of their leadership, or life can become uneasy.

As the public is increasingly hearing, legislative committee members are like handpicked rubber stamps, without the power to mark up bills and send them to the floor for debate, as in Congress.

In part because Albany’s committee system is toothless and tightly controlled, hearings on bills destined to become law are few, as is the testimony of experts and constituents. Who needs to convene a public hearing, really, in a system as undemocratic as New York’s? The Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader make all significant decisions with the governor and their senior staffs: “three men in a room.”

And, who needs an independent budget office, as exists in New York City—for so little understood a $112-billion state budget, the fourth largest in the country. Two hundred and ten legislators typically receive their final copies of the phone-book-thick document with less than a half an hour left before they are expected to vote in favor of it. If they complain too loudly, they could be punished in any number of ways: loss of a committee post, office perks, or a chance for their names to show up on a bill that matters.

Dissenters also can be gerrymandered into a corner, or take a hit on the aid they receive through party apparatus or the budget pork barrel filled with $200 million in “member items” for district-based organizations. Their legislative sponsors were revealed only as a result of a freedom-of-information legal battle waged by the Albany Times-Union.

There are many kinds of murky pork-barrel expenditures, but member items have crystallized, for many, the fiscal sleight-of-hand that exists. Former State Sen. Seymour Lachman (Brooklyn/Staten Island), a Democrat, says Bruno offered him upwards of $2 million in member items for switching parties in a redistricting year, but he flatly demurred.

Another symbol of state government gone wild is the hundreds of wasteful state authorities, the exact number of which are unknown even to the state comptroller’s office, which lacks the staff (by a long shot) to find out what most of them are up to. Though if any fail to repay their total $220 billion in long-term debt commitments, the taxpayers will be the ones to pay.

Spitzer’s landslide augurs well for reform. But Albany remains a swamp of special interests, such as the law firms and underwriters that make millions from the authorities and growing army of lobbyists. But the new governor can start by insisting that the legislature’s decisions about the public treasury are thrown open to view and discussion.

If he plays by the long-entrenched rules of three men in a room, or three emperors in a room, he will do New Yorkers, democracy and his reformist record a disservice.

Robert Polner is public affairs director at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. He is coauthor, with Seymour Lachman, of “Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse” (The New Press, 2006).