So it turns out some key disclosure provisions in freshman Sen. Dan Squadron's ethics reform package are not in the disclosure bill, as I had presumed they would be if they were anywhere, but in his other bill which would set up a new Commission on Governmental Ethics. Those provisions would, I am assured by NYPIRG's Blair Horner, mean that key information on legislators' financial disclosure statements would no longer be redacted, i.e. concealed, but would be made available to the press and public.
Squadron showed up briefly at today's Senate public hearing on ethics reform, but left before testimony by Horner, David Grandeau and Common Cause's Susan Lerner. He did hear testimony from Patricia Salkin, director of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School, who called for slowing down the end-of-session rush to legislation and installing a blue-ribbon commission instead. Horner and Lerner strongly disagreed, with Horner saying he can never recall such a commission resulting in anything useful. The trouble is, laws cobbled together in the usual Albany mixture of rush and secrecy also often fail to accomplish anything useful, which applies in spades to the last disastrous ethics reform law passed in 2007. It also may apply to the procurement lobbying law passed a couple of years earlier, which Grandeau, then head of the lobbying commission (before being forced out by the 2007 law), called unenforceable. That was in 2006, when he said state agencies were not reporting lobbying contacts. Horner at that time disagreed, but was cagier when I asked him today about the procurement lobbying law. He said the Public Intergrity Commission, which was created by the 2007 law, has been generally weak on enforcement, so he does not now know whether the procurement lobbying law is unenforceable.
Sen. Craig Johnson made a cameo appearance and Sen. Liz Krueger participated for a while, but for much of the hearing the only senator there was John Sampson, chairman of the Ethics Committee. He disagreed with Grandeau and Lerner (and by extension with Horner who I think shares their position) regarding one aspect of disclosure: Sampson said legislators who are lawyers should be able to continue to conceal the identity of their private clients.
Squadron, who was playing with his Blackberry during the hearing, had left before those exchanges, so I never got a chance to talk to him. While I give the senator credit for the disclosure provisions in his bill, they are prime items to be discarded or watered down to nothing by Sampson, or Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (who has never disclosed his own private legal income or clients) or Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (who last year filed a thoroughly uninformative disclosure form) or the governor (a former longtime legislator who did not address the disclosure issue in his program bill). Horner (who facetiously gives me credit for pressing the disclosure issue onto NYPIRG's legislative agenda) acknowledged that the end-of-session pressure is to come up with a new overall ethics enforcement structure (given the current standoff between the governor and the PIC) and not specifically to get legislators to disclose their private incomes and clients. I don't see Squadron as having the clout to get it done -- especially if he fails to raise it to the top of his agenda and stick around for meetings. But we'll see by what happens. If meaningful disclosure is enacted, he's the young superhero. If not, and he protests vigorously and publicly, he gets credit. Otherwise, he will be known now and forever as Squadron the showboat.
Update: I see Majority Leader Smith is coming out for more disclosure, for himself and other legislators. And I should clarify that Squadron's bill matches Sampson's position that individual clients of legislator-lawyers could continue to fly under the radar (which was one reason I called his bill too weak in my prior post).
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