This week was Sunshine Week and the League spent it telling
lawmakers they need to do more on ethics. The week started with the League,
NYPIRG, Citizen’s Union, Common Cause, and Reinvent Albany reacting to the
inadequate ethics proposal put forward and passed Tuesday by the Assembly. The
bill, sponsored by Speaker Heasite, limits outside income, closes the LLC
Loophole, requires more disclosure for lobbying groups, and limits expenditures
by “housekeeping” committees. Although
we were happy to see the Assembly at least put something forward on ethics, this proposal is not nearly enough
to curb the persistent corruption plaguing our Capital. For more on our press
conference click here.
The one-house budgets were released over the weekend giving
us limited time to review them before Monday. We were dismayed to see no
additional funding for the State Board of Election in the one-house budgets. We
were also extremely disappointed that the Senate chose only to put forward
reforms on state pensions of convicted felons and term limits for legislative
leaders; not nearly as comprehensive a “package” as we had hoped. We were relieved that the Assembly stayed
true to their word and excluded the Education Investment Tax Credit (EITC) in
their proposal. The Senate did include it and we expect this issue will arise
again in the Assembly Committee on Education at some point this session.
Monday and Tuesday the League met with several members on
the EITC and voting reforms. Tuesday evening the Budget Conference Committees
were announced and the League made an effort to attend as many as
possible. In total we attended 5
conferences including Local Governments, Public Protection, Workforce,
Education, and the initial “Mothership” Conference where the legislative
leaders patted themselves on the back for putting forward such progressive
reforms. In each of the Joint Conference Committees the members of the Senate
and Assembly laid out their goals and highlighted their priorities;
unfortunately there was no mention of possible table targets.
We ended our week on a high note with the release of the recommendations
set forth by Assembly Workforce Committee on Legislative Process. We were very
pleased to see so many common sense reforms for the state legislature. The
proposal includes mandatory webcasting of all Assembly Committee meetings, a
new online portal for all official documents on legislation, WiFi in all state
offices, and moving bill debates to the beginning of the legislative session
rather than saving them for the final weeks. For the full list of
recommendations and a response from the League check out this
article. We are especially excited for the state to FINALLY make LRS
accessible to the public.
No comments:
Post a Comment