PlanetAlbany

Killing Catholic schools

So the state Board of Regents wants 200 more charter schools, and may get support from the governor and state Senate. They are all buying in to the Obama administration's pro-public charter push, even as it colludes in killing off the Washington, D.C. voucher program that funds Roman Catholic and other private schools.

Catholic schools across the country are apparently converting to charters as an alternative to disappearing, a process endorsed by NYC Mayor Bloomberg and the bishop of Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the proliferation of charter schools in the city of Albany is seen as contributing to the decline in Catholic school enrollment there, as well as to a permanent fiscal crisis for the public school district.

Many charter schools, including some in Albany, do good work, outperforming the regular public schools. But the mass closure of Catholic schools is a nationwide educational disaster. Anyone seeking to alleviate it in the Albany Diocese can contribute to the Beacon of Hope Scholarship Fund. (In Brooklyn there's the Futures in Education Foundation at 310 Prospect Park West, NY 11215.)  

Spitzeriana (via New York Post)

So should Eliot Spitzer run for comptroller? Don't ask me. Ask Ashley.  

Another Senate in turmoil

The New York State Senate has had its considerable difficulties of late, including coups with dueling sessions and political payoffs in the summer, and felony convictions with continued absence of ethics reform later in the year. Maybe its miasma has drifted over to South Troy, where the Hudson Valley Community College Student Senate is trying to impeach its president. It voted to do so, according to the front page story in today's edition of The Hudsonian, although it's not clear whether there was a sufficient majority to get it done. This prompted a column by Insights Editor Jesse Carozza, who says:

"Put simply, a body of fourteen adults, ranging in age from late teens to early forties, behaved in a manner that would not be out of place in a sandbox populated by kindergartners. There was shouting, snickering, side conversation, jeering, chaos, calls for silence (polite and impolite), and profanity ... all before the Senate went into executive session." There is apparently some racial animus, and from what I can gather from the coverage, the executive session may been improper. Says Carozza, in words that could be applied to the state Legislature across the river: "You've used up your entitlements and our sympathy. If you want to be respected, act like you deserve it." 

Ethics reform? (updated)

Yeah, yeah, following the Joe Bruno guilty verdict, everyone's theoretically in favor of ethics reform --but the pols still can't get their lines straight. Take Sen. Roy McDonald, who inherited Bruno's Senate seat, and was interviewed following the verdict by The Saratogian. Yes, he's in favor of pols having to disclose more of their outside income. The story says he "acknowledges that questionable business practices are more possible among part-time members of the Legislature, [but] transitioning the state House to a full-time structure could have the effect of limiting who is able to serve in the Legislature.
'I like the idea of citizen legislators,' McDonald said, who noted that even with reimbursements available to members of the Legislature, serving is costly, even for someone with a full-time profession. 'We’re going to have a situation pretty soon, because of the evolution of these jobs, where only the wealthy can take these jobs.' "

That's a line you often hear in Albany, both from upstate Republicans like McDonald and downstate Democrats like Sen. Eric Adams, whose "Show me money" speech on the Senate floor (referencing a Cuba Gooding Jr. movie) is a youtube classic. Adams was demanding a pay raise, and the Albany establishment, including usually sensible groups like the League of Women Voters, backs up the pols in that demand.

But if New York legislators' pay is so low that only rich people can afford to take the job, how come it's $30,000 a year more than the state average? McDonald, Adams  and other state legislators get a base salary of $79,500, and most of them (including all senators) get additional "leadership" stipends. Legislators get generous expenses for travel and hotels (meaning Adams is not out of pocket when he works in Albany), free food regularly provided in session, and can legally use campaign funds for many personal expenses (like paying criminal defense lawyers, which Bruno did).

Look for them to rein in, say, that last perk while still insisting that lawyer-legislators don't have to name their clients, and still angling for a raise. Don't look for them to embrace sacrifice and an ethos of public service. The politicians, senior staff and lawyers en route to becoming lobbyists, state judges who sue to raise their own salaries, and the rest may pay lip service to such idealistic notions, but are actually wedded to the culture of entitlement, which they enthusiastically embrace.

The Bruno verdict (updated)

"Some kind of note, they wouldn't say what," said Ken Bruno at four o'clock this afternoon, walking with his father Joe, the former Senate majority leader, back into the federal courthouse on Broadway. There had been a lot of notes during the jury's deliberations, which extended back before Thanksgiving, but the savvier reporters knew something was up. "This is it," said an AP reporter to me in the courtroom, explaining that previously Bruno's people had been informed about what the jury's notes said. A few minutes before, reporters had been playing cards in the overflow room, the New York Times guy who broke the Spitzer prostitution scandal playing in a foursome including a woman from local TV news 13 and someone from the New York Daily News.

Bruno senior stood with his hands clasped behind him as he listened to the verdict. His close friend and boss Kay Stafford, seated with family members, had her hands pressed together in front of her face.

The first two counts came back not guilty, which obviously raised hopes in the Bruno camp, but jurors were hung on the third count (on which the judge declared a mistrial) and the fourth came back guilty. Ultimately, they acquitted on five counts and convicted on two. Both the guilty counts involved Bruno's dealings with Jared Abbruzzese, which were originally investigated by David Grandeau at the state Lobbying Commission. The U.S. attorney's office had subpoenaed the commission's records on this matter.

Bruno said he would appeal, and he may have grounds given that the U.S. Supreme
Court is about to consider the theft of honest services law under which he was indicted.

A couple of women pedestrians shouted "love you Joe," as he walked away amid a scrum of reporters and cameras, and he thanked them. The scrum walked in front of and halted the Broadway traffic, Joe flanked by Ken and his PR guy Kris Thompson, with another handler in front stopping an oncoming bus. They got into a car parked near the bottom of State Street hill, and quickly drove away west. Back in the day, Joe was driven around in U.S.-made SUVs, but this time he got into a Mercedes 5550. Maybe it belonged to one of the lawyers.

Update: It was Kay Stafford's car according to the end of this story by the TU's Jim Odato, who like Captain Ahab was zealous in nonmotorized pursuit.

Going down with the flow

There is one local news story on the front page of today's Times Union, which the paper breathlessly tells us was produced by "eight reporters and six photographers." They went to a suburban shopping mall for a feature, and the story is headlined in grotesque parody of a Christmas carol, "Mall of wonder, mall of light." Yechh. This seems an even larger misapplication of dwindling resources than the AP assigning 11 reviewers/fact checkers to Sarah Palin's memoir.

Maybe it seemed a brave example of counterintuitive thinking to some twit of an editor, so obviously dumb that it's radically brilliant. Maybe the package does have some good stuff -- how could it not, since there's plenty of talent at the TU -- but I'll never know because I'm not wading through it.

Enabling corruption (updated)

Interesting post from Liz Benjamin yesterday regarding a lawyer named Richard Emery, who is a member of the state Public Integrity Commission. Emery was criticized by Blair Horner, longtime legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group, for hosting a fund-raiser for Manhattan Sen. Eric Schneiderman. Emery's response is rather similar to what Joe Bruno says every day outside the federal courthouse on Broadway, that there aren't any conflicts of interest here, those who say there are are out of line, and how could anyone see anything wrong with the normal way of doing business in Albany?

I called Emery's law firm this morning to try to get hold of him or his partner and fellow PIC member Andrew Celli, but neither got back to me. Here's Emery's denunciation of Horner as quoted by Liz: "Blair Horner sees conflicts of interest like raindrops on a rainy day. He is so pandering to the public's fears that he can't many any reasoned distinctions. It behooves him to take some responsibility from his public platform and have some intellectual integrity to distinguish conflicts of interest from simple political participation. The problem is like the opportunistic talking heads on FOX. Blair Horner represents the same problem from the other side, and that is a total lack of intellectual integrity. If he can cite me one ethical precept, one law, one regulation, one serious person who views this as a conflict, then I will listen. But I will not listen to Blair Horner's yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater."

Emery and Celli previously drew Horner's fire over the summer, after they were hired by Senate Democrats during the "coup" when control of the chamber was up for grabs. I emailed Horner about all this and here's his response:

"My concern is that Emery, who is on a commission that oversees --
among other things -- legislative lobbying, creates a conflict when he
hosts a fundraiser for a legislator.  For example, what if an
investigation found evidence of a lobbyist giving an illegal gift to
Schneiderman?  Emery has a conflict.
Emery and Celli are partners, they are both on the Commission on
Public Integrity, and both were paid by the Senate Democrats to
represent them during the coup in the case against [Sen. Pedro] Espada (another
mistake in my opinion, I don't think members of the commission should
be involved in political fundraising or from receiving
government/partisan contracts)."

Schneiderman is supposedly the point man for a new ethics bill being negotiated with the Assembly. He told me on Nov. 10 that a new bill was about to be unveiled, but it has yet to see the light of day. They are in negotiations with the Assembly, Schneiderman spokesman James Freedland told me today. Earlier this year I attended a Senate hearing chaired by Sen. John Sampson, now chairman of the Democratic conference, and he argued against the position of good-government lobbyists like Horner who wanted legislators who are lawyers to have to publicly disclose their private clients. Freedland said the new version of the bill being negotiated with the Assembly does not include requirements for such disclosure.

That has long been the position of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who is himself paid an undisclosed amount by a Manhattan law firm to represent undisclosed clients. The Assembly did, however, pass an ethics bill during the summer that has modest but real improvements regarding disclosure, although it would still keep a legislator-lawyer's clients secret. Freedland cited "lawyer-client privilege issues" as the explanation. There was overwhelming bipartisan support for that bill in the Senate, but it didn't pass because Sampson and Schneiderman kept it off the floor while they pushed a different bill (which they called an amendment to the Assembly bill, although bringing it up first). This amendment, while supported by Horner and the goo-goos, was seen by Republicans as excessively partisan and undermining the Board of Elections. It didn't pass, either. I also called freshman Sen. Dan Squadron this morning, who earlier this year was making noises about ethics and sponsored the Assembly bill in the Senate while also supporting the Sampson-Schneiderman amendment -- but he has apparently been neutered and didn't get back to me. Melissa Mansfield, a spokeswoman for Silver, confirmed that discussions are ongoing with the Senate, based on the Assembly bill. The Senate amendment also is being discussed, she said.

I asked Horner about the bills, and specifically the question of disclosing lawyers' clients, and he responded: "To my knowledge there is no Schneiderman bill.  During negotiations, there appeared to be a Senate position that merged together the Squadron and Sampson bills and added a few things.  Whether that would have been Scheiderman's bill, I don't know.  None of the additions addressed the questions you raised. ... I think he [Schneiderman] was working on something, but I don't think it was introduced and I haven't seen it."

In any case, the Legislature is unlikely to be back in Albany this year so nothing can pass until 2010, when they'll probably do something -- maybe as little as they can get away with, which has the advantage of leaving "reformers" always able to call for more "reform."

I don't know Emery, but remember Celli from his days on the Lobbying Commission, especially in 2007 when the so-called ethics "reform" law was passed which created the PIC with a majority of gubernatorial appointees while leaving the Legislature to non-regulate itself. It looked like the new law would drive the Lobbying Commission's executive director, David Grandeau, out of office. When I pressed Celli on Grandeau's future he said my question was "silly," as if I was failing to reach the lofty ethical plane on which he operated. He did deign to speak down from his height to the Times, saying Grandeau “was fundamentally guided by a sense that transparency was a really important thing in government, but he’s not the only person in the universe that feels that way.”

The 2007 ethics bill did force out Grandeau, whom the goo-goos universally acknowledged as the only effective ethics enforcer in Albany (apart from the U.S. attorney's office, which followed up on Grandeau's work in the Bruno prosecution). Emery and Celli both have ties to Eliot Spitzer, and I think Celli felt obliged to support Gov. Spitzer's ethics bill (which also was Bruno's and Silver's). Later, Celli was accused by Darren Dopp, the former Spitzer aide left to take the fall for Troopergate, of improperly defending the PIC executive director who was leaking information to the Spitzer camp. As a result of the Troopergate fiasco, Gov. David Paterson grew so dissatisfied with the PIC that he called for the resignation of all its members, a request to which he holds but they have arrogantly rejected. (I couldn't get hold of Grandeau or Dopp today.)

No matter which way the Bruno verdict goes, a naive person might hope it would spur meaningful ethics reform at the Capitol. But scandal after scandal has failed to fundamentally affect the way Albany does business, in substantial part because partisanship and power always trump ethics, and what the two parties share is a massive sense of entitlement. What the pols are really outraged about is that they haven't had a pay raise for almost 11 years, and Grandeau cut down on the free meals they could cadge from lobbyists, which then become excuses for why they need to make all that private-sector money. That makes up some of the "privilege" which the politicians and lawyers want to protect, and which they indignantly defend when some mere goo-goo or reporter dares to question what no "serious person" would.

Whether or not Bruno is guilty of breaking a law, the scandal in Albany is what's legal (unless the feds rope you in with one of their broad statutes). Well connected lawyers like Emery and Celli are co-dependents and enablers of the systemic sleaze -- like those Senate chief counsels and ethics lawyers who have been testifying at the Bruno trial about how they tried to keep things legal.

Update: Morgan Hook, a spokesman for Paterson, sends along this statement: "Governor Paterson has proposed sweeping ethics reform legislation that would create a truly independent, functional and efficient Government Ethics Commission to replace the existing Public Integrity Commission. Real reform means zero tolerance for anything other than full transparency and accountability and the Governor has made it clear that the time has come for a comprehensive overhaul of Albany’s broken ethics system."

Senate gay marriage debate (updated, bill defeated)

I'm listening/watching at home from the Times Union's Capitol Confidential link (the link at the Senate Web site wasn't working). I missed Sen. Ruben Diaz, but so far he has apparently been the only opponent. Now his fellow Democrats (including prior fence sitter David Valesky) are coming out one by one for the bill. I was at the Assembly debate earlier this year, where opponents failed to put up much of a show. They will likely muster a higher proportion of votes in this house, but opponents cannot expect to prevail in the short or long term if they are afraid to debate.

Sponsor Sen. Tom Duane has just closed the debate, and I guess Diaz was the only opponent who spoke. They are tallying the vote.

Sen. Eric Adams is speaking to explain his (positive) vote, so I guess there may be more debate now.

Republican Sen. Kemp Hannon, who had been reported as a fence sitter, voted no. Democrat Sen. Carl Kruger also a no, along with his fellow amigo Hiram Monserrate. Democratic Sen. Onorato another no. Doesn't sound like it's passed. Wow, it lost 38-24.

TU labor update

I checked in with Albany Newspaper Guild President Tim O'Brien about the union's ongoing dispute with The Times Union, and he told me they are essentially in a holding pattern for the next couple of months, waiting for a decision by the National Labor Relations Board. Meanwhile, the Guild's cancelthetu Web site remains active, but it is not exactly asking people not to buy the paper. Rather, the Guild wants subscribers to give it the power to cancel their subscriptions at some potential later date, which they can do by going on the cancelthetu.com Web site. So far, the Guild has not pulled the plug on those subscriptions, and its supporters are still getting the paper.

Courtroom conversation

On the third day of jury deliberations without a result at the Joe Bruno trial, the former Senate majority leader recognized a familiar face in the courtroom and during a break went over to sit next to Tom Precious, longtime Capitol correspondent of the Buffalo News. He was cracking wise about how everyone, especially Tom, commits at least three felonies a day according to the theories of federal prosecutors, and I didn't know exactly what he was talking about. Then the judge came back in and Bruno responded to Tom or someone that "only the rest of my life" is at stake here, at the same time as he was walking back up to his regular seat next to the lawyers and trying to explain to me what he had been talking about. It came from a recent New York Times article that referred to a former attorney general, he said.

So when I got home I looked up the Times Web site, but couldn't find anything like that under Bruno's name. That's because the article didn't mention him. It ran Nov. 24 and was headlined Right and Left Join Forces on Criminal Justice, and was about growing criticism of federal prosecutions, including by former Attorney Generals Edwin Meese and Dick Thornburgh. The article, by Adam Liptak, referred to a new book, “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent,” which "argues that federal criminal law is so comprehensive and vague that all Americans violate it every day, meaning prosecutors can indict anyone at all."

The Times article also referred to the specific law under which Bruno is being prosecuted, mentioning a  U.S. Chamber of Commerce "brief about a federal law often used to prosecute corporate executives and politicians. The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of 'honest services,' is, the brief said, both 'unintelligible' and 'used to target a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.'
 "The Supreme Court will hear three cases concerning the honest-services law this term, indicating an exceptional interest in the topic."