This week was a very exciting week for the League. We kicked
off the second week of May with a large list of priority bills being moved in
both the Assembly and Senate. On Monday we stood with Senator Daniel Squadron
and his Senate allies outside of the Senate chamber to make one final push to
move his LLC loophole bill through committee and onto the floor. We were joined
by Senators Kreuger, Latimer, Rivera, Montgomery, Little, and Kaminski; as well
as the Assembly sponsor Brian Kavanagh. There was quite a showing of press and
several reporters made their way over to the committee meeting to see what would
happen to the bill. Unfortunately, the bill did not move to the floor. Instead
Senator Akshar moved the bill into Codes, he said this was requested by a
member of the Codes Committee but did not specify who. Senator Squadron was
distressed over the new committee assignment and this will likely be the last
we hear about this bill for the rest of session. The League was also interested in two other
bills in this committee, one on early voting and one on electronic poll books.
Both bills were moved to new committees and we are hopeful that they will reach
the main calendar before the end of session.
On Tuesday the League had its annual lobby day. It was an
extremely busy day and many other groups were also holding events and lobby
days including the coalition on Raise the Age. Several of our members from
Schenectady attended the Raise the Age press conference and lobbied with the group.
After our morning presentations our members spent the afternoon mingling with
their local legislators and advocating for voting and ethics reforms, as well
as several social policy issues.
Wednesday was not quite as busy or exciting but the
constitutional amendment on no-excuse absentee voting was moved to the assembly
calendar (finally!) and a bill on allowing the State Board of Elections to make
use of voters email addresses was also moved to Ways and Means.
Thursday former Senate Majority leader Dean Skelos and his
son Adam were finally sentenced following their acts of corruption when Skelos
was leader. The former Senator received 5 years and his son was sentenced to
6.5. The trial was live tweeted by several reporters and much like the Silver sentencing,
we spent the hour and a half leading up to the sentences glued to our phones.
Whether or not these sentences are enough to deter corruption in Albany remains
to be seen. The rest of session will surely be interesting especially since it
appears the US Attorney’s investigation of Buffalo Billion funding is finally
heating up. As Preet Brahara would say “stay tuned”!
