The January 1,2009 Issue of The Capitol

VOL. 2, NO. 1 JaNuary 2009

Shelley Mayer keeps the Senate Democrats in line.

Page 16

Daniel Squadron shakes off his firstday nerves.

Page 21

www.nycapitolnews.com

Project Sunlight is one-year old,and growing.

Page 19

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David Paterson tries to find his inner governor

www.nycapitolnews.com� January 2009 THE CAPITOL

No ExcusesL

ong before Barack Obama bounded up steps to announce his presidential candidacy in front of the Old State Capitol Building in Springfield in February 2007, New Yorkers were already

intensely familiar with another sloganeer promising a fast and comprehensive revolution right here at home. Even by then, though, “Day One, Everything Changes” was more of a laugh line than an inspiration, used by rueful Eliot Spitzer supporters or mocking detractors, and really by nobody else.

Some things changed since Spitzer’s landslide election. The comptroller did. The governor did. The state’s economic condition did. The majority leader did—twice, the second time along with a historic shift in power.

That last change is the one to precipitate real change, according to all those who worked to achieve it and stand in support. For the first time in 34 years, state government is fully in the hands of one party, with all the promises of removed roadblocks and stopped stonewalling that brings. Albany, for so long the land of inertia, is to become a place of great activity, free-flowing with transformative legislation. No longer will problems be left to fester for years without being picked up for debate. One-house bills will become a thing of the past, signed laws as regular as train delays in winter. Whether one agrees with the kind of policies promised to be passed or not, the idea of movement itself was to be a refreshing change.

There is reason for pessimism, perhaps no better exemplified than by the Senate Democrats’ decision to postpone movement on their own rules reforms until after most of the session is done. Most disturbing, though, is how obvious it is that some people will try to use the rationale they put forward—that the budget crisis must be resolved before anything else—as an excuse for just about everything this year.

A $15 billion hole is nothing to take lightly. The legislative leaders would be wise to follow the intelligence and wisdom demonstrated by Governor Paterson in presenting his executive budget early by acting ahead of schedule as well. Negotiating the necessary cuts and recalculations will not be easy, nor can the many questions involved be resolved quickly.

But to use the budget crisis as the new reason for not getting anything done in Albany is nothing short of government malpractice. As giant as the deficit is, one would

To use the budget crisis

as the new reason for not getting

anything done in Albany is

nothing short of government

malpractice.

hope that the state government will be capable of walking and chewing gum, slashing the budget and handling other legislation simultaneously. There is far too much to be done to leave things to another day, especially when that day could come years from now, since only the most naïve could believe that our budget problems will evaporate after 2009. Everything in some way depends on available

funding, but that should not prevent the many able legislators in both chambers of the Capitol from at least beginning to put together real, practical frameworks for laws to improve the state’s approach to energy, health care, agriculture, job creation, innovative technology, criminal justice reform, housing, labor, transportation and financial services—to name a few.

Granted, Shelly Silver and Malcolm Smith will be busy in the months ahead, as will those of their members leading the budget negotiations. That leaves the burden on other members of the Assembly and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, to act as the leaders they were elected to be. Nothing but their own daring stops them from stepping up to propose new ideas.

That the structures of both chambers realistically limit committees’ powers demonstrates quite clearly the need to strengthen committees and empower their chairs. In Washington, the national and international economic situation will be a weight that hangs on all that is done and can be done in Congress, but with live, active committees holding their own hearings and sending bills to the floor for votes, the government will manage to do more than simply haggle over the much larger federal budget. Albany needs to follow this example. There is no shortage of reforms that would benefit the state capitol, but creating a real committee system, coupled with a real ability to bring votes to the floor, would be the most significant and productive of all.

Government is an incremental process, and Albany, especially with a slim two-seat margin in the State Senate, is destined to remain a naturally incremental place. Few really expected everything to change on New Year’s Day two years ago, and no one expects everything to change now. But some things can. Change has come to America. It can also come to Albany. C

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The Capitol is published monthly.Copyright © 2009, Manhattan Media, LLC


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Forethought


By DaviD FreeDlanDer

In front of the Queens Museum on a dark and cold night last December, reporters and cameramen

from the always voracious New York City press corps were standing in a shivering huddle.

Inside, by the coat check, a woman of late middle age in pearls and rouge leaned over to her campaign and intoned an explanation.

“Caroline Kennedy,” she whispered.That simple. The Queens County Democrats holiday

party, a no-press affair, was one more stop on the Caroline Kennedy Introduction Tour as a cascade of inevitability swept up America’s sweetheart in her quasi-campaign to be named the next senator from the state of New York.

A few days earlier, Brooklyn county boss Vito Lopez (D) had endorsed her, a sign to many observers that the political class was receiving loud and clear messages that she was the one.

There had been by that point an upstate tour, which many presumed was done with the blessing of Gov. David Paterson (D), with whom the final decision ultimately rested. There was the sit-down with Rev. Al Sharpton at Sylvia’s, apparently enough to quiet the man who could raise the most troubling questions about why the Senate seat should go to a middle-aged socialite from the Upper East Side whose previous accomplishments included editing a book of her mother’s favorite poems, among other books.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (Ind.) right-hand political man, Kevin Sheekey, was reportedly calling around to labor leaders urging them to jump on board the ever-expanding bandwagon, referring to Kennedy’s appointment as a done deal.

So when she emerged into the main hall at the Queens Museum at the side of county leader Rep. Joseph Crowley, a powerful and practical pol wary of wasting political capital for anything less than a sure thing, everyone knew the Kennedy appointment was just that, a sure thing. With one arm he steered her through the throng of Democratic insiders and aspiring district leaders. Kennedy listened politely as gray-bearded insiders regaled her with stories about her father and her uncle. She already had mastered the camera-ready grip and grin and willingly administered it to everyone in the room who wanted a shot of themselves with the next senator for future campaign literature.

Not long after, he led her up onto stage.

“I hope to come back many times,” she told the crowd.

Crowley then put her through the kind of debasing all politicians must go through at one time or another: a few choruses of “Jingle Bells.”

Grimacing tightly, she did.“Laughing all the way. Hey Hey Hey

Hey.”But elsewhere, cracks in the

inevitability were already showing.Her handlers, led by Josh Isay and his

superstar consulting firm Knickerbocker SKD, had presumed that her visits with upstate legislative leaders would not merit much attention; instead, the local officials had, out of courtesy, tipped off the local newsmen and women, and the word spread. To their surprise, Kennedy was greeted by a throng of reporters

whom she blithely skated past.That would prove the first, but not the

last time, that Kennedy’s handlers would underestimate the press corps.

“Reporters have to be respected under all circumstances,” said one rival campaign consultant. “The press corps in New York City and state is filled with serious people. You can’t get into a situation where you don’t have answers, and can’t bob and weave your way out of it.”

Two days later, Kennedy aired her views on the critical issues facing the state and the nation for the first time. Only instead of answering questions, she had her spokesman fill out responses to a questionnaire submitted by Politico and even then the answers were unsatisfying and vague.

Sample:Question: Do you think Sen.

Schumer made a mistake when he successfully pushed to have the Glass-Steagal Act repealed, breaking down barriers between securities firms and banks? What priorities would you set for restructuring New York’s financial services industry? And which of the

current financial regulatory plans would you support?

Answer: “At this time, Caroline does not have a specific plan to fix New York’s financial services industry.”

“She’s leading people to think she doesn’t have any thoughts about the economy or the war or Israel or a whole host of issues,” said one prominent Democrat at the time. “Politicians can be vague when they have a foundation of public service that you can trust. When you are a blank canvas you need to paint a picture for yourself or your adversaries will do it for you.”

Most gallingly, when asked if she would pledge to support the Democratic nominee for mayor in 2009, the woman with the most Democratic last name in the world declined to comment, setting off a fury among local party stalwarts.

Suddenly, it was open season. Congressman—and 2009 Bloomberg

opponent—Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn/Queens) questioned whether or not she had “the fire in the belly.” Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-Queens/Nassau) had already compared her to J-Lo.

A Dec. 9 Marist Poll showed that a quarter of New Yorkers favored making her the next senator, about as many that favored Andrew Cuomo.

If that number rose as she traveled around the state, to say, 50 percent, many political observers said Paterson would have no choice but to select her.

Instead it sunk. According to someone close to her handlers, they never intended to have her meet with the press as early as she did and felt backed into a corner by questions of her readiness.

When she gave a few interviews in the dead news zone that is the week between Christmas and New Year’s, she came off as unsteady at best. She never did do another round with the press, even as she did more work behind the scenes like that night at the museum.

Finally freed from the agony on stage, she made her way back through the crowd, trailed by Isay, maniacally tapping on his Blackberry and scanning the room, glasses perched on his nose. Without turning, she walked past the famed panorama of New York City and ran into Weiner and his girlfriend, Huma Abedin.

“Huma!” she said, bending to kiss Hillary Clinton’s body woman on the cheek.

Weiner, meanwhile, got a polite nod in his direction.

Then it was off to the waiting car, breezing past the press corps still waiting for her out in the cold. They shouted questions. She smiled, saying not much back, only: “I’m having a very good time.”

[email protected]

“I hope to come back many times,” Kennedy

told the crowd at the Queens Museum.

The Un-Making of a SenatorCaroline Kennedy’s brief foray into the humiliations of local politics

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who pays the

The Executive Budget proposal for education

would devastate New York’s public schools and

reverse the progress we’ve made in education, from

pre-kindergarten through post-grad. New Yorkers

overwhelmingly support raising the income tax on

the wealthy to protect vital public services and

oppose cuts to education and health care.

Do the right thing: Ask our wealthiest citizensto pay their fair share. Don’t balance thebudget on the backs of our neediest children.

price?

www.nysut.org

New York State United Teachers represents more than 600,000 professionals in education and health care.

Richard C. Iannuzzi, President

When schools get cut,


Progressive Dismay Over Gillibrand Choice Shakes PartyBy Chris Bragg

During her insurgent 2006Congressional campaign to unseat a four-term Republican

incumbent, Kirsten Gillibrand received the warm embrace of progressive Democrats in her congressional district, which branches out north and south from Albany and across to the state’s eastern border.

“We held the first event for her candidacy in April 2005,” said Larry Dudley, who heads the Glens Falls chapter of Democracy for America, a liberal grassroots group. “We just worked our asses off for her. We worked ourselves to the bone.”

What a difference four years can make: Dudley now says he would almost certainly support a challenger to Gillibrand in a Democratic primary when she seeks election to the Senate in 2010, following Gillibrand’s appointment to fill out the remainder of Hillary Clinton’s term. Dudley believes Gillibrand recanted on 2006 campaign promises and made a sharp turn to the right once she got to Congress.

“We’ve been unhappy for a long time,” he said, adding that he and many other progressives sat out Gillibrand’s successful 2008 reelection campaign.

The mood of liberals in Gillibrand’s home district represents a statewide dissatisfaction among progressive Democrats with Gov. David Paterson’s (D) Senate selection. Following a presidential election in which Democrats won back the White House in

a landslide, nearly won a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and appear to

have a mandate to pursue a progressive agenda, the appointment of a Blue Dog

Democrat caught many by surprise. “It totally contradicts the grassroots

energy that elected President Obama,” said Jonathan Tasini, who ran against Clinton as an anti-war candidate in the 2006 Democratic primary and had been threatening to support another progressive candidate even before Paterson’s choice became clear. “I think it will alienate many young people.”

Whether the wound can be mended by 2010 remains a question, though one

that for now does not seem to concern the governor. Pressed at the appointment press conference on how he would knit the divisions in the party that the selection process and the ultimate result has caused, he joked, “I’m not going to knit at all.”

Others were more skeptical, including one liberal political operative who said like-minded people were in a state of “awe and shock” over the appointment. But as a representative now of the whole state, the operative suggested, Gillibrand may yet put their minds at ease by moving to the left on key issues like gun rights.

“She’s been a huge opportunist in Congress—and maybe she’s really just not that conservative. Maybe she’ll continue to be a huge opportunist in the Senate, and everyone will be mildly happy,” said the operative.

To many Republicans, however, the unhappiness those on the left feel with the choice is precisely what made Gillibrand a smart pick for the governor, buoying his own reelection prospects, given Gillibrand’s upstate roots and likely appeal to women.

Republicans were less forgiving, however, about the months-long process it took to finally settle on Gillibrand, saying through all the sniping and turmoil during the interim, Paterson had done serious damage to his party and himself.

“It was an affront to the public. It was a circus that rivaled what went on in

Illinois,” said Matt Walter, executive director of the New York Republican State Committee. “It presents [Paterson] as ineffective and weak, and not able to make executive decisions—not exactly the qualities you want in a leader.

“She’s been a huge opportunist in Congress—and maybe she’s really just not that conservative. Maybe

she’ll continue to be a huge oppor-tunist in the Senate, and everyone

will be mildly happy,” said the pro-gressive political operative.

>>Continued on page 11

By andrew J. hawkins

When Gov. David Paterson(D) chose Kirsten Gillibrand for

the Senate, he made a very conscious nod to two important constituencies in New York: upstaters and women.

But, by picking someone whose views on guns and immigration are to the right of the voters in the state, he may have angered a third: the true blue liberals who make up the vast majority of the Democratic Party base.

Gillibrand, savvy politician that she has proven to be thus far, is likely, many political observers say, to pick a couple of issues that are important to the left-wingers in order to show her progressive bona fides and to stave off any potential challengers.

Assembly Member Richard Gottfried (D-Manhattan), an unreconstructed liberal from Manhattan’s Upper West

Side, says the new senator could loudly start to proclaim her support for marriage equality and abortion rights to reassure state Democrats.

“In terms of her establishing herself politically in New York, I think those two issues,” he said, “have gotten kind of lost in the shuffle here and I think are issues that would send an important signal to an awful lot of voters.”

During her three years in Congress, Gillibrand established herself as an advocate for the rights of women and children, supporting a number of bills that would have eliminated work place discrimination and expand access to reproductive contraception.

Marcia Pappas, president of the New York chapter of the National Organization of Women, said her group planned to press Gillibrand to continue supporting the passage of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, as well as

softening some of her hard line stances on immigration.

Gillibrand is requesting to be placed on the same two committees in the Senate she sat on in the House: Armed Services and Agriculture. Ned Sullivan, president of Scenic Hudson, a 40-year-old environmental preservation group, said that in her quest to win over popular opinions, he wants to see Gillibrand broaden her support for the farming industry to include more environment and sustainability causes. To that end, Sullivan said, Gillibrand may want to rethink her committee requests.

“We’re hoping she’ll replace Clinton on the Environment and Public Works Committee,” Sullivan said. “There she could continue [Hillary’s] great work on protecting the environment.”

But with a recent poll showing more Republicans in the state than Democrats approving of Paterson’s pick, Gillibrand

may have to do more than request a specific committee to win over skeptical members of her party in time for 2010.

Fortunately for her, the next election is two years away, giving her plenty of time to do just that, said Kyle Kotary, an Albany-based Democratic consultant and a member of the Bethlehem town board.

“She will be meeting with those groups that are giving her a rough time,” said Kotary. “We need to give her a chance to re-think some of the positions she’s taken in the past.”

In the end, Gillibrand’s greatest strengths are not her ability to pass the right bills or advocate for the right issues, Kotary said. Her true skills are political.

“She has out-fundraised, outworked and outsmarted most of her political opponents,” he said. “So we should be careful not to underestimate Kirsten Gillibrand.”

[email protected]

Gov. David Paterson’s selection of Kirsten Gillibrand is being met with some skepticism, especially in light of the upstate congresswoman’s red state-friendly record, from gun rights to immigration to the economy.

The Nervous Left Suggests Ways for Gillibrand to Reach OutA guide to progressive peacemaking for the new junior senator

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THE CAPITOL JANUARY 2009 9www.nycapitolnews.com

Regulatory Oversight for Health Insurance Premiums is Urgently NeededBY SUPERINTENDENT ERIC DINALLO

Under New York’s deregulated “fi le and use” system, enacted

in 1996, health insurers can increase premium rates by meeting minimal fi ling requirements, with virtually no regulatory oversight. Health insurers are simply required to pre-certify that 75 percent of premiums collected will be paid towards insurance claims (such as doctor and hospital bills), but insurers are not

required to supply data supporting that pre-certifi cation.

Why would the state adopt a fi le-and-use system, thereby allowing supposedly regulated businesses to set their own rates? Like other deregulatory efforts, the goal of fi le-and-use was to create an administratively effi cient system that would lead to appropriate premium rates based on objective market standards that balanced costs versus profi ts. But unfortunately, the fi le-and-use laws contain several loopholes that serve the interests of health insurers’ profi ts to the detriment of consumers.

For example, insurers can infl ate estimates on how many outstanding claims for patient treatment health providers have not yet fi led with them for payment. By infl ating the estimate of these claims, insurers can appear to meet

the fi le-and-use law’s requirement that 75 percent of premiums go to pay claims.

Even if these loopholes could be closed, deregulation suffers from a fatal fl aw. Under the current system, the Insurance Department cannot determine before the rate is increased whether actuarial assumptions are reasonable or even whether simple mathematical calculations are correct.

Thus, deregulation has been a classic case of “justice delayed is justice denied.” If an insurer’s calculations turn out to be wrong and it overcharges policyholders, the fi le-and-use law requires the insurer to refund overpayments to policyholders. The Insurance Department has required health insurers to refund more than $100 million in overcharges to businesses and consumers. But under fi le-and-use, these refunds are only available to those who pay the unjustifi ably imposed premium increase, not those who had to cancel their coverage because they could not afford the rate increase in the fi rst place.

Deregulation of health insurance premiums has therefore not resulted in appropriate premium rates, but has added inappropriate costs to a broken system that everyone can agree is too costly already. For example, from 1996-1999, before deregulation was fully implemented, HMO rates for individual health plans rose an

average of 7.59 percent annually. After deregulation, from 2000-2006, those rates increased an average of 15.99 percent annually. HMO profi ts or net income increased from under 1 percent in 1996 to nearly 6 percent in 2005. In 2008, four New York health insurers had more than $1 billion in dividends.

An increase in profi ts of health insurers is one of many cost drivers that have resulted in erosion of employer-based coverage and have made coverage prohibitively expensive for individuals without employer-based coverage. The impact of high health care costs on New

York’s economy has been signifi cant. Small business owners want but cannot afford to provide coverage for their employees. Those who do provide coverage are at a competitive disadvantage in terms of their operating costs. Individuals without coverage are less likely to receive the care they need, tend to be in worse health when they do receive care and receive fewer preventive services than the insured.

Deregulation of health insurance premiums has exacerbated these problems by adding inappropriate costs to the system. Therefore, the Insurance Department’s primary legislative goal is to urge the Legislature to repeal fi le-and-use and reinstate the Department’s prior approval authority. As the health care system is strained by increased costs, appropriate calculation of premium rates and balancing of costs versus profi ts becomes increasingly important. Prior approval can be used to ensure that premiums are not excessive, inadequate or unfairly discriminatory. If there is any lesson to be learned from the disasters that have affected our fi nancial markets, it is that strong, effective regulation is necessary to serve the public interest.

Eric Dinallo is the superintendent

of the New York State Department of

Insurance.

ISSUE FORUM: INSURANCE

BY STATE SEN. NEIL BRESLIN

After last year’s meltdownon Wall Street, observers from almost every political and

ideological perspective agreed that the fi nancial industry crisis was created in part by the failure of government to provide appropriate oversight and regulation.

Because our public institutions failed to act to rein in excessive behavior on Wall Street, businesses, workers and families got hurt badly.

A similar thing has been happening here in New York in the area of health insurance and oversight of health maintenance organizations (HMOs).

Health insurance costs have soared out of reach for New York businesses, workers and families. It’s not an abstract problem: ask any business owner who’s tried to do the right thing and provide health insurance for their employees or any worker who’s trying to keep up with rising premiums, co-payments and deductibles, and you can hear the real-world details.

It’s a business problem: more than two-thirds of New York small businesses polled last year said the cost of health insurance was an important issue for them.

And it’s a family problem: over 2.5 million New Yorkers are now without any

health insurance coverage, and millions more have gone without needed care due to unaffordable cost-sharing.

A report issued late last year by the respected health care advocacy group Families USA shows that between 2000 and 2007, health insurance premiums for employer-sponsored coverage in New York rose by 80.7 percent, while median wages went up by only 11 percent. Premiums rose 7.3 times faster than median earnings here, a rate that was fi fth-worst in the nation and signifi cantly higher than the national average.

One big reason we’re slipping so far behind is a legal structure that has prevented our State Insurance Department and other authorities from

exercising appropriate oversight and regulation over HMO rate increases and insurance company payment policies.

HMOs have been allowed to “fi le and use” rate increases of any magnitude, and they’ve taken advantage of deregulation to increase health premiums by over 80 percent this decade.

Deregulation has also allowed HMOs to keep more and more of every premium dollar in profi ts, leaving less and less to pay health care providers, including community hospitals and neighborhood doctors.

Again, this is not an abstract problem: face-to-face conversations with hospital administrators and family doctors result in dozens of terrible stories about HMOs that refuse to pay for lifesaving care or that offer “take it or leave it” reimbursement rates that can’t compensate for careful primary and preventive health care.

During testimony at a hearing I held in Rochester last year, one physician told me how perplexed he was that the insurers have managed to position themselves between the doctor and the patient.

Just like it did on Wall Street before the meltdown, the pendulum on HMOs and health insurance policy has swung too far towards deregulation—and businesses, workers, hospitals and doctors are paying the price.

As the ranking member of the Senate Insurance Committee, I’ll start working this

month with business, labor and the health care community to develop common-sense HMO reforms that will bring down costs and improve health care access for New York families and businesses.

We’ll work to bring down costs for businesses and workers by reforming stop-loss funding pools for direct-pay and Healthy New York coverage and bringing together individual and small-group coverage programs into a seamless whole.

We’ll work with State Health Commissioner Richard Daines to make our nation-leading Family Health Plus program available to more businesses and workers, providing better coverage at lower cost.

In this effort, we’ll prove to New Yorkers of all political and ideological perspectives that appropriate government oversight and regulation can work to improve the lives of everyday people, including business owners and hard-working families.

While our nation may have missed the chance to bring needed regulations and reforms to Wall Street, it’s not too late to provide appropriate oversight and HMO reform that will reduce costs and improve access to health care for millions of New Yorkers.

Neil Breslin, a Democrat represent-

ing Albany, is the chair of the Senate

Insurance Committee.

Like Wall Street, Health Insurance Policy Has Had Too Much Deregulation

Economic Development Merger. Right idea,but wrong direction.Governor David Paterson wants to improve

the effectiveness of the state’s economicdevelopment programs by integrating threeagencies. The state Public EmployeesFederation (PEF) agrees with the governor’sgoal, but the merger takes the wrong direction.The governor wants to abolish the state

Department of Economic Development (DED)and the Foundation for Science, Technologyand Innovation (NYSTAR), merging them intothe Empire State Development Corporation(ESDC). The merged program would then

become an off-budget public authority, withlittle public disclosure or oversight, creating anexpanded dumping ground for highly paidpolitical appointees, while needlessly laying offqualified DED professionals.Aren’t we trying to move away from that

direction? Don’t we all want more transparencyand accountability, not less?The same goal of improving effectiveness

can be achieved by merging ESDC andNYSTAR into DED, the state agency, withoutany negative impact on cost or efficiency whilepreserving the civil service and bargainingrights of the employees.

Tell the governor he needs to move in theright direction against DED layoffs and towardmore accountability and professionalism,not less.

The Economic Development MergerRight idea, wrong direction.

CUT THE WASTE.NOT THE WORKERS.

Clip & send to Gov. or Call 1-877-255-9417

�

New York StatePublic Employees Federation, AFL- CIO

Representing 59,000 professional, scientific, and technical employeesKenneth Brynien Arlea IgoePresident Secretary-Treasurer

pef.org

THE CAPITOL January 2009 11www.nycapitolnews.com

>> Continued from page 6Gillibrand

A New Mom in a New Role, Gillibrand Will Have Her Work Cut Out for Her

By Nicole Turso

Being a new mother is tough. Being a new mother with constituents to please is even tougher.

“Working an odd, full-time position as an elected official interferes with raising your children,” said New York City Coun-cil Member Diana Reyna (D-Brooklyn), who, with her husband, is raising two boys. “You want to do it all and be all, but you have to have your limitations.”

Kristen Gillibrand (D), Gov. David Pa-terson’s (D) appointee for the junior Sen-ate seat, has two sons—Theodore, 5, and Henry, who is 6 months old.

As a congresswoman, Gillibrand worked right up to the day she gave birth, receiving praise from her House col-leagues. But a Senate seat comes with more responsibility and, arguably, even less time.

“There’s no magic formula,” said fel-low New York City Council Member Jes-sica Lappin (D-Manhattan), who also has a young son. “It’s about balancing your family life and your work life. For me, it means setting some boundaries and being willing every once in a while to say ‘no.”’

Both Lappin and Reyna agree that per-sonal sacrifices have to be made to be a public servant. Lappin said her profession-al life begins at seven or eight in the morn-ing and sometimes does not end until well after the normal business quitting time.

“The most difficult days are the days that I don’t see him at all,” Lappin said. “But to me, the honor of being able to be a public servant makes it worthwhile.”

But kids, especially small ones, can sometimes get their elected parents into sticky situations.

Reyna was once forced to bring her toddler to a Sunday morning press con-ference at City Hall while her husband was at work. She juggled addressing the press and keeping her cool as her son played—not with toys—but with the re-porters’ radio cables.

“He’s a child,” she said. “He’s curious.” Embarrassment aside, Reyna said she

puts her boys first.“They’re my number one constituents,”

she concluded.

Not only does the infighting present a political disaster, but it’s a problem for the state. The next domino to fall is that no one’s been paying attention to the $15 billion budget deficit because of this sideshow.”

For all the rancor still circulating, Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf said the party could still come together in time for the 2010 election. Whether

this happens will depend less on how liberally Gillibrand votes in Congress, Sheinkopf predicted, than on how the party coalesces around her, or fails to, over the next few weeks.

“The governor’s job now is to bring everybody together,” Sheinkopf said. “It’s not what she does. It’s what the Democratic leadership has to do. They are going to exert themselves in pressing for there not to be a primary.”

Democratic State Chair June O’Neill shrugged off the concerns, as well as the fact that several downstate members of

Congress—including Senate appointee hopefuls Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan/Queens), Steve Israel (D-Suffolk) and Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn), along with potential primary challenger Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-Nassau)—were noticeably absent from the appointment press conference. Congress, after all, was in session, and they might have had other things to do, she said.

“They wouldn’t put their own personal interests ahead of the governor and the party,” O’Neill said.

Asked about how the current feelings might play out between now and the primary next September and what she could do to head off any party divisions, O’Neill said she was not concerned there would be a problem, but was already working on efforts to head off any that might arise. What those efforts might be, though, she would not say.

“That’s a long way from now,” she insisted. “It’s all inside baseball. I don’t show my cards. Let’s just leave it at that.”

[email protected]

www.nycapitolnews.com12 JANUARY 2009 THE CAPITOL

he decision was never going to be easy.Mix in all the insanity inherent in anything involving Hillary Clinton, the national media fi restorm thanks to Caroline Kennedy’s throwing down the gauntlet and the backdrop of Rod Blagojevich’s mini-Mafi oso-

approach to fi lling Illinois’ own vacancy, and the task in front of Gov. David Paterson (D) in picking the new junior senator

got even harder. Everyone was paying attention. Everyone wanted to know

what he was going to do. Everyone had a candidate. Except David Paterson.

Sure, a month earlier, Blagojevich managed to make his pick, who, for all of the trouble surrounding the governor, was quickly accepted as a pretty reasonable choice. In Delaware, the Biden clan convinced the governor to help engineer a placeholder senator until the new vice president’s son returns to claim the seat after his tour of duty in Iraq. And in Colorado, Gov. Bill Ritter (D)—a man known for favoring blue ribbon commissions and other methods of governmental procrastination—announced his choice to replace Sen. Ken Salazar (D) a full three weeks before Paterson stood on stage in an Albany basement to let the world know that he had fi nally, at about 3 a.m. that morning, settled on Kirsten Gillibrand (D).

“I didn’t ask for this responsibility,” Paterson said, starting the press conference on a defensive note. He was talking about having the sole power to appoint a replacement senator, though he could just as easily have been talking about being governor at all.

Every governor tries to create a persona distinct from his predecessors. Paterson is no different, but the timing and circumstances which put him in the job have resulted in an uncertain leadership marked by a strong deference to the Legislature, a hazy circle of advisors, a reluctance to challenge the Albany status quo and an unexpected move to the center. There has been no shortage of coverage, but no clear sense of what he is trying to do.

Remove one unfortunate evening at the Mayfl ower Hotel and Eliot Spitzer would still be governor, Eliot Spitzer would be the one responsible for cleaning up the mess the state fi nds itself in, and Eliot Spitzer would be the one who had to justify the undemocratic nature of picking Clinton’s successor with just one vote. And Paterson, meanwhile, would almost defi nitely have been the one picked and headed out of town.

tries to fi nd

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BY EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

David Paterson

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Instead, he is governor at a time when the governor could be one of the most transformative in New York history. The only modern governor who has gotten to appoint both a senator and a new chief judge of the Court of Appeals, he inherits a budget crisis that demands the kind of cuts which, if done creatively, could have an enormous impact on all sorts of state policies. If he is up to it, Paterson has the opportunity to radically remake New York.

The problem, though, is that to many observers, he does not seem to know what he wants or how to go about getting it, as they say his behavior throughout the Senate appointment process exemplifi es. An inability to decide, a move away from actual transparency despite being very public about his confusion over what to do, a lack of a defi ned circle of trusted advisors, a tendency to get distracted, a lack of follow-up, a natural inclination to defl ect serious discussions with jokes, a bizarre competitiveness which leaves him unwilling to let other politicians succeed where he has not, an overarching fear of his own political weaknesses going into 2010, a willingness to surprise supporters—those who know and have watched Paterson saw all these refracted in the two-and-a-half month ordeal since the news of Clinton’s trip to Chicago fi rst leaked.

The hastily convened press conference to announce Gillibrand was representative: the disorganization that caused the two interruptions by attempted congratulatory phone calls from President Barack Obama (D), the lack of attention that put former Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R) and former Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer (D) in front of nearly everyone else on stage, the push back on transparency that rewarded reporters with only 15 minutes of questions after sitting tight for an hour of prepared remarks (the answer, according to one press aide, still annoyed that they could not get reporters to sit down during a break before the question and answer period: “Honestly, if you guys would have stayed


where you were, we could have started earlier.”)Gillibrand will have her own political challenges over the next two years. Paterson

will as well: There is a general election waiting for him, and maybe a primary. Whether this fi rst high-profi le executive decision will continue to resonate with voters next fall is an open question.

Whether the decision, the process by which he arrived there, and what it all says about his approach to the job will continue to resonate with his colleagues in government over the next year and a half is not.

“The biggest challenge in a situation like this is that most people will tell you there’s only one way to do things, or there are things you

must do, or are never permitted to do as governor,” said State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan/Bronx), a close friend who served as Paterson’s deputy minority leader.

Before his 15 months as lieutenant governor, the extent of what could even be stretched to call Paterson’s executive experience was the four years he ran the Democratic conference in the Senate, outmaneuvering then-State Sen. Martin Connor (D-Brooklyn/Manhattan) in a leadership coup then grabbing several several Republican seats which made taking the majority suddenly possible.

But even for someone with more experience, his ascension as governor could not have come at a worse time, with the budget deadline two weeks away and the state on the cusp of insolvency. The challenges piled up: Over the weekend between Spitzer

announcing his resignation and the move taking effect, Bear Stearns collapsed, and for good measure, so did a crane a few blocks east of its corporate headquarters.

Yet Paterson seemed unfl ustered as he sat through the barrage of emergency briefi ngs, immediately adapting to suddenly having the power to tell people what to do.

“He showed from the very fi rst week that he was in offi ce that he was willing and able to make tough decisions and make them quickly,” said David Nocenti, who served as Spitzer’s chief counsel and stayed in the inner circle for the fi rst few months of Paterson’s administration.

Paterson had a shining public debut. Emerging from the Spitzer earthquake, he was greeted by intense cheers and applause at just about every comma of the speech he gave immediately after being sworn in as governor last March. But besides the long list of thank-yous, a seemingly endless supply of hilarious anecdotes, impressions of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) and a few general policy statements that no one could take issue with, there was not much to the speech. But it was enough at that strange moment. We might all still be rubbing our eyes in disbelief, he reassured Albany and the rest of New York, but everything was going to be okay.

There was a fi rmness of purpose very consciously conveyed. Beyond that, there was a stark warning about the economy unlike anything most politicians were even willing to hint at back then. And Paterson kept at it, Schneiderman said, admirably casting himself as the sober voice of government in a time of peril, much as he has seen Obama doing since becoming president.

“There are a lot of consultants who would tell their clients, ‘Don’t be the bearer of bad news.’ He decided he really needed to engage the public on this,” Schneiderman said, describing what he sees as the central element of Paterson’s executive mentality. “He ultimately makes his own decisions. He’s more of a run-and-gun playmaking quarterback than a pocket passer.”

That push to engage the public was a crucial element of the tone Paterson set, said State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli (D), a fellow former legislator who has himself been adjusting to life as an executive since his promotion in February 2007.

“At every turn, the governor’s been ahead of the pack at identifying that challenging reality and working to come up with solutions,” DiNapoli said. “His leadership has been defi ned fi rst of all by seeing the problem, then trying to defi ne that problem both to fellow policy makers and explaining it in a way that everyday New Yorkers can understand.”

Not that this won the governor many acolytes at fi rst. When he tried to take a hard line in the fi nal negotiations of the budget he took over, people complained. When he ordered a 3 percent cutback in agency spending shortly afterward, people asked why. When he made a public address to New Yorkers that another Great Depression might be on the horizon, people laughed or quietly forgave him for grasping at an overly strong posture as he called the Legislature back into session to start slashing spending.

For some, that fi rst shift in his demeanor was when the honeymoon ended. Getting on television to tell New Yorkers that he was “going to end the legislators’ vacations and

bring them back to Albany to reprioritize the way we manage New York State’s fi nances,” was great showmanship, the kind of populist fi nger in the eye to the government status quo which had made Spitzer such a powerful political fi gure. But unlike Spitzer, for both the August and November special sessions, Paterson asked the legislative leaders to present their own plans on what to cut. He would then work out compromises.

Based on the press coverage, the governor won those rounds. But based on the actual impact on fi xing the budget, no one did.

By the time he presented his executive budget, Paterson seemed to have incorporated the lessons of the special session. He did not throw the responsibility too much onto the Legislature, though he stopped short of returning to the dictatorial Spitzer approach. Nonetheless, the response to the multiple-volume plan he released in December was underwhelming, both to his take-it-or-come-up-with-something-better

“None of us are privy to the turmoil that’s probably going on inside, but he’s handled it with aplomb,” said Assembly

Member Keith Wright. “He’s admonished the Legislature when necessary. He’s

made some pretty heavy decisions when necessary. And he has been harsh with

people when necessary.”

www.nycapitolnews.com14 JANUARY 2009 THE CAPITOLattitude and to proposals that once again seemed designed to grab headlines but not produce real policy, like the iTunes and sugar soda taxes.

Some legislators grumble that while they are happy to see the governor reach out, Paterson is still shoving the politically unpopular decisions onto them.

“The kind of leadership it’s been is that the pin’s been pulled on the grenade and he’s tossed it to us,” complained Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco (R-Saratoga/Schenectady). “He’s just thrown the grenade to us and said, ‘What do you got?’ That’s not what a leader is supposed to do. He’s supposed to point the way, lead us to the promised land.”

What legislators seem to have been looking for and still hope to fi nd in the months of intense budget negotiations ahead is a governor who takes a wider view and sets the tone for the hard choices that will be necessary.

“He started off so well defi ning the problem,” said one, who was prepared at the outset to compare Paterson to that other former state senator who served as New York’s governor as the economy tanked. “Classic Roosevelt: communicate tough times, tell them there’s hope. But where’s the hope?”

The fear is that Paterson may not have the administrative capacity to perform better on the budget than he did in appointing a senator. Because of his visual impairment, Paterson is necessarily more reliant on others than most politicians. Perhaps because of this, he guards his trust very closely. Talking to him is easy, said one politician, but fi guring out what he is thinking can be impossible.

Though it was not for Charles O’Byrne, the top aide whose forced resignation in October seemed to throw the administration into a tailspin. Paterson and O’Byrne still speak, but for the most part, the governor has been leaning on a combination of his father, former Secretary of State Basil Paterson and a triumvirate which includes new secretary to the governor William Cunningham, budget director Laura Anglin and director of state operations Dennis Whalen. But his persisting lack of a defi nitive governing philosophy or administration fully his own has clearly hobbled him. Reports about the Senate deliberations laid the problem bare: Multiple people claimed to have a line on what the governor was thinking, even when those lines confl icted and ultimately proved incorrect. To those trying to deal with Paterson and his administration, this uncertainty about who to talk to is precisely the problem: they are unsure of where they stand and how best to reach out to the second fl oor. They see the governor as increasingly isolated, a trend which some legislators feel makes them less able to get direction from him and him less able to hear them.

Between that isolation and his increasingly hands-off management approach, the politician whose style Paterson’s is most starting to resemble, in the view of New York Public Interest Group (NYPIRG) legislative director Blair

Horner, is the last state senator to move into the executive chamber: Gov. George Pataki (R).

“He’s retreated into running Albany in a way that’s really not very dissimilar to the way Pataki did it,” Horner said, “in playing it close to the vest, kind of ignoring a goal of operating in the open. Pataki never wanted to do that either.”

Unlike the always on-message Pataki, Paterson has a tendency to wander off script in public statements. He has made some moves to be forthright, from stomping on his own news cycle to reveal his marital indiscretions less than 24 hours after taking the oath of offi ce, to regularly reviewing his performances in after-the-fact interviews. But looking at the actions behind the rhetoric—such as openly wrestling with the Senate choice, but keeping a secret of the list of applicants, the content of the questionnaires he sent out and the responses he got back—Horner believes the secretive shadow of Pataki looms surprisingly large.

So too with Paterson’s apparent disinterest in reforming Albany, Horner said, panning the governor’s State of the State address in January.

“It’s the fi rst State of the State that I can think of in the 25 years I’ve been in Albany that the governor didn’t talk about reform. Some of them weren’t that serious about it, but at least they talked about it,” he said. “It could be that Paterson just doesn’t want to be Spitzer, that dropping all that could be a fi g leaf to the Legislature. But that’s the best case scenario.”

Unlike Spitzer—or any other governor in recent history—Paterson has such a deep reservoir of personal good will in the Capitol that many have been willing to cut him extra slack as he fi nds his footing. But with his uncertain approach to the job leading to the sneaking suspicion that the second fl oor is without a rudder, some are beginning to grow restless.

And though most legislators hardly missed the call to reform in the State of the State, the rest of the substance-light speech did not put them at ease. While interrupted by applause over 55 times, afterwards, what seemed to stick out most to people about Paterson’s dry, hour-long performance was the impressive feat of memorization it entailed (despite scattered worries about what offi cial business he had not gotten to during the many hours of lodging the lines in his brain).

Like a magician diverting attention, by getting people talking about the remarkable way he delivered the speech, Paterson kept the focus away from the fact that his most declarative sentence was the hardly controversial “Hate has no place in the Empire State,” earning him a standing ovation bigger than for any line except the one in which he praised the New Yorkers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He made no major new demands on the budget in the speech. Instead, without the

money to pay for the smörgasbord of grand policy proposals usually laid out in State of the State speeches, Paterson looked to build on his efforts to be communicator-in-chief. Following this approach, he laid out some larger problems facing New York and suggested basic, cheap solutions for them, like sending his wife around the state to raise awareness of childhood obesity.

There were a few ambitious plans, like creating a upstate renewable energy consortium and scrapping the Rockefeller drug laws, but the swipes at defi nitive policy, such as the Spitzer-esque plan—complete with Spitzer-esque declaration that “if the federal government does not act in this arena, I shall”—to use state law to regulate the fi nancial industry, were markedly briefer and more vague.

Asked to elaborate two weeks afterward about what he might be ready to do or when he would be prepared to do in terms of these regulations, he did not say much.

“I’m ready to do it now,” he said, referring to the preparations which

were made to subject the American International Group (AIG) to the oversight granted by state insurance laws before the company’s solvency was restored by a federal bailout.

“In these types of cases, from our state Banking Department, our Insurance Department, our Department of Taxation and Finance—any place that we see an opportunity to perform any function that would create regulation, which is why we wanted the Department of Insurance to look at the regulations on some of the fi nancial innovation tools that were made, such as the CDSs [credit default swaps],” he said, providing his full answer to the question, “these are areas that we are willing to involve ourselves.”

If there are any new laws he expects to pass on this or anything else, they are still a long way off: given the enormity of the budget crisis, Paterson has yet to have a discussion with legislative leaders about setting any agenda beyond cutting costs and raising revenue. He has won praise from other governors around the country for his leadership of the effort to get special attention to states in a federal stimulus package, but back home, his leadership has continued to be muddled. Just as he seemed to lack a clear idea

of what he was looking for in the new senator, he seems to still lack a clear idea of what he might eventually want the Legislature to do.

For all the changes in attitude and all the complaints, Assembly Member Keith Wright (D-

Manhattan) remains impressed. “He’s made it look kind of easy,

actually,” Wright said of the man he served alongside of as a legislator from an overlapping district and still counts as a friend. “None of us are privy to the turmoil that’s probably going on inside, but he’s handled it with aplomb. He’s admonished the Legislature when necessary. He’s made some pretty heavy decisions when necessary. And he has been harsh with people when necessary.”

Others are more skeptical, frustrated that their governor is now the country’s most famous undecided voter and that the result of all that hemming and hawing was a candidate whom any political

consultant could have identifi ed as the obvious choice from the outset. What is clear is that the Gillibrand choice is consistent with Paterson’s willingness to buck his old ideological allies in his time as governor, a trait alternatively seen as the sign of a maturing statesman willing to forge new ground or as a sign of an unfortunate obsession with political gamesmanship.

To his former counsel David Nocenti, who believes the criticisms about indecisiveness were undeserved, both these miss the point. On the contrary, the delay in making the Senate pick “was a demonstration of deliberateness in using the available time to make sure you reach the

best result for an extremely important decision. There’s a very big difference between that and indecisiveness.”

In the budget negotiations ahead, Paterson will be looking to prove that he can rebound in the polls, bat back the rumors that there is a more serious health problem behind his eye surgery last summer and recurrent headaches, and allay the fears that his administration has gone irretrievably off the tracks. He will have to reassure people that regardless of his approach to the Senate selection, regardless of his back-and-forth on things like the trip to Davos, he is in fact a strong leader who will be able to dominate Albany in the next year and a half and be a potent political force come next year’s elections.

Not to worry, said Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-Queens), another longtime friend. Everything so far has been prologue, however confusing.

“I think he wasn’t trusting his own intellect and intuition more than he did other people’s,” Smith said. “What has happened now is that he’s trusting David.”

In other words, Governor Paterson may fi nally be about to emerge.

[email protected]

Those who know and have watched Paterson

saw just about everything in his approach to being

governor over the past 10 months refracted in the

two-and-a-half month ordeal of picking Hillary

Clinton’s replacement.


Talk of Raises Persists Despite Tough Economic Climate, Though in Muted TonesJudges especially, but some legislators as well, continue to press their case

By D a nie l e Dwa r D r o s e n

In 2007, State Sen. Eric Adams(D-Brooklyn) could not have been firmer in his convictions about increasing legislative salaries.

“Show me the money,” he demanded of the then-GOP controlled Senate, arguing that giving lawmakers their first raise in eight years would help attract and keep the best people in Albany. But in the face of the $15 billion deficit, even Adams has completely backed off the idea.

“It would be hypocritical for us to tell the state that we need to sacrifice, and we, as legislators, are not going to make a sacrifice,” says Adams. “I would not vote for a pay raise right now.”

But no raises for legislators will likely also mean no raises for state judges, many of whose own salaries have been locked at $136,700 in the past decade. And there seems to be little hope of movement any time soon, since while the Legislature could give the judges a raise independently, they have so far insisted on tying any increase to a bump in their own checks—which is all but impossible politically in the current economic climate.

“So much in politics is timing, and the timing couldn’t be worse for judicial pay raises in lieu of the

budget crisis,” says State Sen. John DeFrancisco (R-Onondaga), who in 2007, while chair of the Judiciary Committee, helped pass two bills that—had they been approved by the Assembly—would have expedited judicial pay raises.

But that logic does not hold to some supporters of raising judges’ pay.

“I think any time an increase for judges is a ‘bad’ time,” says George Bundy Smith, former Associate Judge of the New York Court of Appeals and current partner at Chadbourne & Parke LLP.

In the meantime, since judicial and legislative salaries were last raised, approximately 195,000 non-judicial and non-legislative state employees have received pay raises that have benefited from bargaining agreements and salary schedules.

Two recent lawsuits filed against the state, one by former Chief Judge Judith Kaye and the other by New York City Family Court Judge Susan Larabee, sought to remove legislators from deciding judicial salaries. Both suits also accused the executive and legislative branches of unconstitutionally using judicial pay to push issues not related to the judiciary, such as education tax credits and congestion pricing. The

cases are still awaiting ruling, which may delay judicial pay hikes further.

In June 2008, Supreme Court Justice Edward Lehner ruled in favor of the judges in the Larabee case, saying state government had “used the issue of judicial pay as a pawn in dealing with the unresolved political issue of legislative compensation,” agreeing that the state’s actions were “unconstitutional.”

Gov. David Paterson (D) appealed the decision in September, arguing that the State Constitution gives the Legislature alone the ability to decide judicial wages. The case is still being heard in Appellate Court First Division. Lehrer has yet to make his decision on the matter, and a person close to the Kaye case said that he may wait to do so until the Larabee case is decided in Appellate Court.

Meanwhile, judges have been dealing with a spike in their caseloads: civil filings in New York have grown by 35 percent since 1999, while statewide filings have grown by 15 percent. In that time, because their salaries have not been recalculated to include cost-of-living expenses, the judiciary has seen the value of their salaries deflate by nearly 30 percent. Today, lawyers at any top Manhattan firm make $43,300 more in the first year out of school than judges who have been on the bench for 30 years.

“It’s difficult and demoralizing,” says Chief Administrative Judge Ann Pfau. “ If you look at the number of foreclosures, family court cases, the new jurisdiction—all of which is fine and we’re happy to do them—there is a basic inequity when you’re asking people with a certain level of experience to do more for less.”

Judges are not allowed to work second jobs, save for teaching—unlike legislators, many of whom maintain second jobs that provide significant income on top of their $79,500 base salary and the leadership stipend “lulus” that can range from $9,000 to $41,500.

Not that all the legislators are satisfied with the current salaries and the definitions of their jobs as part-time, especially several of those who live in New York City, where life tends to be more expensive.

“When legislators say they don’t deserve a raise, I question whether they are working hard enough,” said State Sen. Andrew Lanza (R-Staten Island). “This is by no means a part-time job. Just ask my wife and kids. To do it right, you have to devote yourself.” Lanza recently started working for a small Staten Island law firm as his savings from his days as an accountant and a Wall Street executive began to run short.

For judges who are already dealing with lower salaries, the pain is even more acute.

“It’s very difficult when you have electric and gas bills to pay and with children going to college,” said Fern Fisher, the administrative judge of the Manhattan Civil Court, who said a bulk of her pay goes to her daughter’s $50,000 tuition at Boston College.

That pressure, which has driven some judges from the bench in search of private practice salaries and increased stress on may of those who have stayed, is creating problems for the judiciary, according to Fisher

“It’s taking a toll on the judges,” she said.Direct letters to the editor [email protected]

Since judicial and legislative salaries

were last raised, approximately

195,000 non-judicial and non-legislative

state employees have received pay raises.


BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

Ask around the state about Shelley Mayer, the new counsel to the Senate Democratic

majority, and a confl icting portrait begins to emerge.

She is “a warm, friendly person of sterling character,” said Robert Abrams, the former attorney general who hired Mayer as an assistant prosecutor in his offi ce, charged with crafting housing and civil rights legislation.

“With a smile, she can bring you around to her way of thinking,” said Assembly Member Mike Spano (D-Westchester), who fended off a challenge from Mayer in 2006 and has since become a friend.

She is warm. She smiles. But she is also a seasoned political player, unafraid to do battle with the Senate Republican minority in the advancement of the Democratic agenda.

“She’s like a minuteman, if you will, a Paul Revere type,” said Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-Queens), who

hired her as his minority counsel after her failed Assembly campaign

Mayer concedes Smith’s comparison, saying her years involved in the legislative process have prepared her for what will undoubtedly be tough times ahead.

“I’ve been through my share of wars,” Mayer said, laughing. “I think that’s the advantage of not being young when you do this job.”

As counsel, Mayer will oversee all of the legal and policy minutiae of the Senate Democratic majority, ensuring that all bills that come to the fl oor are drafted appropriately, while also making sure the operation of the Senate fl oor proceeds in a “dignifi ed and respectful way.” And if the Senate becomes the subject of lawsuits or challenges, she would represent the

institution in court. A key member of Smith’s inner circle

who has been constantly at his elbow since the November elections tipped the majority to the Democrats, Mayer said she plans to take a different approach to her job than previous counsels, a necessity after the Senate passed rules reforms which empower rank-and-fi le members and members of the minority.

“I think as a result, the fl oor is going to be a much more dynamic place because minority members will have the opportunity to debate on motions,” she said.

Another change Mayer said she is aiming for is putting a stop to one-house bills. With Democrats in control of both chambers, largely symbolic one-house bills can become a thing of the past, she said.

“We should try to fi nd meaningful things where we can achieve consensus,” she said. “I would like to see us do bills that we can pass in both houses.”

The diversity within the Senate Democratic conference will also make her job unique, she said, pointing to the

intense negotiations over two months that were necessary to keep the State Sens. Carl Kruger (Brooklyn), Ruben Diaz Sr. (Bronx) and Pedro Espada (Bronx) in the fold.

But whatever diffi culty she has had so far in keeping the conference on point will be nothing compared to what lies ahead now that her party is in control, said Michael Avella, who served as majority counsel under then-Republican Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

“I had 32 members, she has 32 members,” said Avella, who now works for Albany lobbyist Brian Meara. “Balancing the needs of each individual member within the conference as a whole, that’s the most diffi cult challenge.”

Avella added, “Sometimes you have to take positions that are looking out for the

conference but may not exactly be what an individual member needs for his or her parochial interests.”

Mayer said her career thus far has prepared her for all the ins and outs of Albany’s particular style of political deal making.

Born and raised in Yonkers, she received her law degree from UCLA before coming back east to work as a vice president for community and government affairs for Continuum Health Partners, one of the state’s largest hospital systems. Following that, she worked in the offi ces of attorneys general Abrams and G. Oliver Koppel, where she helped craft

housing and civil rights legislation that was usually blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate.

“I learned a lot about how to advance an agenda when you can’t always do it legislatively,” she said, “by building consensus and coalitions outside the legislature.”

She has also been tested on the campaign trail. Her 2006 run against Spano, who ran as a Republican before switching to the Democrats in 2007, was her fi rst and only foray into campaigning on her own.

Mayer and Spano sniped at each other throughout the race, most notably when he fi led a complaint accusing her of running misleading advertisements about wasted funding on the war in Iraq that were designed to prey on voter’s emotions.

Now Spano says he admires that same toughness which once gave him such trouble.

“The majority needs this right now,” Spano said.

[email protected]

“She’s like a minuteman, if you will, a Paul Revere type,” said Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith.

Mayer Takes on Central Role to Spearhead Senate DemocratsA key member of the inner circle, Smith’s consigliere lays out her big plans

Shelley Mayer said she plans to take a different and more forceful ap-proach to her job than counsels past.


The Publication for and about New York

State Government

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Uncertain Economy, Uncertain Plans and Uncertain Mission for ESDCLegislators, business leaders question upstate commitment and Empire Zone reforms

By S a l G e nt ile

Gov. David Paterson is receiving fresh criticism for his handling of the state’s troubled economic development agencies,

which for months have endured a considerable amount of turmoil and been accused of lacking effectiveness.

Paterson has proposed folding the Department of Economic Development and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR), a public authority, into the Empire State Development Corporation, which oversees and facilitates economic development projects in the state.

His administration estimates that the changes would save $16.5 million in the next fiscal year. But as a public benefit corporation, ESDC is subject to laxer legislative scrutiny than state agencies and has had a history of controversy involving some of its high-profile projects, like Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Some legislators, especially those from upstate, are leery of the proposed changes and the effect they may have in directing the flow of economic development dollars.

After a series of high-profile staff resignations last year, many have begun to question ESDC’s mission and asked what exactly the agency should be doing during a time of economic distress.

“What we we’re doing, what we have to do, is to look at the needs and then focus on those that are the highest priority, and then set the stage for the private sector to return and invest its money when the economic downturn ends,” said ESDC President and CEO Marisa Lago in a telephone interview immediately following a meeting with the state’s new senator, Kirsten Gillibrand (D).

Lago added that Gillibrand will be crucial to the ESDC’s mission, since the agency will likely be in charge of implementing whatever federal stimulus money the state receives from Washington.“It’s not that government is going to step in and finance speculative projects where the private sector lenders have walked away,” Lago said.

But private sector investors have been walking away, or threatening to walk away, at an alarming pace in recent months because of the barren economic climate and a set of controversial changes the administration has proposed to the state’s system of tax incentives, which ESDC administers.

The governor has proposed letting the state’s Empire Zone program, which provides a variety of tax credits to companies that invest in certain regions of the state, expire in 2011, replaced by a more stringent and, Paterson claims, more effective set of incentives.

At the moment, new companies that enter the system are required to return $20 of investment and job creation for every $1 the government doles out in tax credits. But that standard does not apply to companies—some 8,000—which entered the system before 2005, when the cost-benefit ratio was 15-1. Paterson would require those companies to either meet the new standard or lose their tax credits, a move he estimates would save the state close to $300 million in the next fiscal year.

But members of the Legislature and business leaders from across the state have expressed concern over some of the changes, saying they are at odds with what the state’s primary economic development mission should be during a recession: spurring investment and retaining jobs.

“I think that the governor has been poorly advised in advancing this proposal,” said Assembly Member Robin Schimminger, a Democrat from Erie and Niagara counties who chairs the Economic Development Committee. “I expect that, were it to become law, it would result in litigation, the relocation of companies out of state and a significant impairment of New York State’s economic development credibility.”

Schimminger and Larkin both said that companies in their districts have already threatened to close down or leave the state were they to lose their tax incentives. Others have halted nascent plans to invest in New York because their business plans had counted on tax credits from the state.

“Some companies just cannot meet that standard,” Schimminger said of the 20-1 cost-benefit ratio. “Many zone administrators are saying that right now.”

Paterson has said he will consider recalibrating the plan to exempt regions that benefit from the program as it is currently configured. But his fight with the Legislature over the remaining reforms—including untangling a knot of loopholes that have allowed companies such as Wal-Mart to perform well below the legal standard—is likely to have a significant impact on the flow of state and federal dollars toward economic development projects, and on the fate of countless jobs and small businesses across the state.

Lago said the government should focus on using the economic slowdown as an opportunity to repair the state’s ailing infrastructure. Rather than spur private investment now, she said, the government needs to fill in the gaps while it waits for private investment to return.

“We have shovel-ready sites that are available,” she said. “So that, when the private financing markets free up, we then have the infrastructure that’s available. That’s important to private investment.”

[email protected]

The appointment of Robert Wilmers, above, to be the chair of the Empire State Development Corporation was geared in part to soothe concerns about the agency’s attention to upstate.

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Grassroots Republi-cans and several for-mer leaders are pre-paring to challenge state GOP leaders to have full-fl edged debates about ide-ology.

RepublicansReassess, Refl ect, Reconsider

BY SAL GENTILE

A few weeks ago, Ed Cox and Bill Powers were sitting

on the set of Fox & Friends—the morning gabfest on the cable home of conservative politics—when conversation turned to the intellectual sclerosis affecting the Republican Party.

“Give me one good idea,” Cox, son-in-law of Richard Nixon and chair of the McCain campaign in New York, challenged Powers.

So Powers—the gravelly former Marine, state party chair and Al D’Amato avatar—tried one out: Mandatory arbitration for medical malpractice claims. The state should mandate, Powers argued, that patients take their claims against hospitals to independent arbitrators, rather than through the courts. Such a system, he said, would immediately wipe away exorbitant rewards for patients and discourage frivolous lawsuits, bringing down health insurance costs in New York.

The idea needed vetting. It required careful kneading, poll testing and translation into political language. It was also bound to agitate any number of interest groups—tort lawyers, patients’ rights advocates, labor unions—and would need to be padded with features that would make it more digestible for voters.

But it was an idea. And, they believed, a viable one.The conversation was just one of many touched off

within GOP circles across the state after the party was cast out of power in November—and not just among Republican power brokers on sound stages. The chatter has bubbled up on the Internet, at dinner tables and, as one party operative put it, “in dark little corners of restaurants.”

An intellectual resurgence, at the lowest levels of the party, has begun to sprout. Sort of.

Now that their party has lost the majority in the State Senate—that was the last stronghold in the state—Republicans readily rattle off a litany of well-publicized missteps that caused the collapse. Among the main contenders: the awkward alliance that Gov. George Pataki (R) struck with labor unions in 2002; big-spending county executives in places like Nassau and Erie that drove local governments deep into debt; and harping on volatile social issues, such as gay marriage.

Politically adept Democrats, meanwhile, co-opted many of the Republicans’ signature issues, such as

property tax reform, government effi ciency and spending restraint, even seizing the old intellectual pipelines through which new Republican policies have tended to fl ow.

“We are constantly having meetings with elected offi cials and party offi cials who come to us looking for ideas,” said Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute, which made its name funneling ideas to the Rudolph Giuliani’s administration when he was mayor of New York. “And overwhelmingly, these days, those people are Democrats.”

However, now that Republicans have been pushed from power, some detect an opportunity to reengineer the conventional role of the opposition party and generate new and innovative policy ideas, freed from the constraints on a party in a power.

As one state senator, walking into a post-election meeting in Albany, put it: “I can be a Republican now.”

Republicans across the state have begun to patch together a new intellectual framework to reassemble the channels through which policy ideas fl ow—or, at the very minimum, create the space for an internal debate

about what the party should stand for.“I think there’s going to be some differences, but I

think that’s healthy because we really do want to be a party that’s viable statewide and show that we are

alive,” said Jay Dutcher, chairman of the Ontario County Republican Party.

In order to show voters and the political establishment that the party still has life, Republicans have to at least do something worth noticing, say Dutcher and his allies, even if this means scraping and clawing over the ideological essence of the party.

Dutcher and a group of Rochester-area Republicans have sketched the initial blueprints for what they believe will be the fi rst generation of a new intellectual infrastructure for the party. He is

currently planning, along with state party leaders, a series of caucuses and receptions scattered throughout the state to act as mobile think tanks,

putting policy experts, party leaders and grassroots activists together in one room.

Dutcher acknowledges that the regional fractures running through the party may make that a messy process. But the most effective salve

for what ails the Republican Party, he said, is a vibrant intellectual debate—even if it exposes the party’s ideological fi ssures.

“It’s so the state leadership will have an opportunity to hear from people outside the Albany-New York City orbit,” explaining the thinking behind the effort. “The party needs to be a statewide party, not just focused in a couple of areas.”

Whether Dutcher or any other revolutionary can be effective while Senate Minority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau) and state Chair

Joseph Mondello remain in charge is an open question. They have looked toward their own solutions, like Mondello’s December appointment of former state Tax Commissioner Andrew Eristoff to head a commission with the offi cial mission of providing “a clear assessment of where we are now and help develop a blueprint to move forward.”

Eristoff himself admitted, however, that the commission’s main purpose is fundraising, and that searching for new ideas is not much of a focus. To some frustrated Republicans, this is symptomatic of state party leaders’ traditional unwillingness to engage in open ideological debates for fear that these might fracture the party along regional and cultural lines and expose those divisions to the rest of the political establishment.

But after their string of losses, Mondello, Skelos and their allies may no longer have the credibility necessary to defl ate such efforts—a weakness other power brokers clearly sense.

Cox, who is speculated to be interested in a run for offi ce himself in 2010 or possibly a bid for state chair, and 2006 gubernatorial candidate John Faso, for example, have assembled their own political action committee, which they will operate, along with a clutch of fellow Republican big-wigs, parallel to the state party infrastructure. They hope to use it as a think tank as much as a fundraising arm, taking ideas like Powers’ health care proposal and turning them into policy proposals that can be branded as Republican and fed to candidates throughout the state—and that the public can easily digest.

“The key to this is to continue to work to make sure that you’ve got a coherent governing philosophy and political strategy to make sure that folks know what you stand for,” Faso said. “And that’s where I think we’ve collectively fallen down.”

[email protected]

Ed Cox and John Faso have assembled their own political action committee, which they

will operate, along with a clutch of fellow Republican

operatives, parallel to the state party infrastructure.

Intellectual resurgence budding at the GOP grassroots


By A ndr e w J. H Aw k ins

One year ago, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (D) said let there be light, and there was Project

Sunlight, the government transparency website he had promised on the 2006 campaign trail that allows the public to browse campaign finance disclosures, state contracts, legislation, charities and more.

Since its launch in December 2007, the site (www.sunlightny.com) has spawned two more transparency websites: Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s (D) Open Book New York (www.openbooknewyork.com) and See Through NY (www.seethroughny.net), a project of the Empire Center for New York State Policy.

But Sunlight was the first. And according to several good government advocates, the site is continuing to be the model for even more technologically savvy projects in the works.

“It helped break the mold,” said Blair Horner, legislative director at the New York Public Interest Research Group, who left the organization for one year to help Cuomo develop the site.

“As a result of that innovation,” Horner added, “other public officials are now starting to think outside the box on how they can use new technologies to make more information available to the public.”

The site, which cost about $1 million to develop, has received 250,000 page views since its launch.

Emboldened by their success, Cuomo’s office is looking to expand the database’s scope by inputting data on state charities, conflict of interest disclosures and zoning information.

“It’s a service to New Yorkers,” said John Milgrim, a spokesman for Cuomo. “We believe it has encouraged more transparency by other government agencies and other groups that have been looking to develop sites.”

Milgrim said that disclosures from the Wind Industry Code of Ethics, designed to deter improper relationships between wind development companies and local government officials, is currently being added to Project Sunlight. And in September 2008, eager to bolster his consumer advocacy work, Cuomo added another website to his docket—Know Your Contractor (www.nyknowyourcontractor.com)–which allows users to search the complaint and legal history of home improvement contractors.

But despite the positive feedback for Project Sunlight, Milgrim said that any major effort to expand the site would be subject to the whims of the budget, which is facing serious shortfalls.

“Obviously, with the resources you have, you have to figure out your priorities,” Milgrim said.

The project’s funding has been in danger before. In 2007, Senate Republicans dropped $700,000 from the budget, leading Cuomo to personally lobby then-Majority Leader Joseph Bruno for its restoration. Early last year, Assembly Member Andrew Hevesi (D-Queens) spoke out against Sunlight during a closed-door meeting, saying that Cuomo would use the site to attack members of the Legislature. (Hevesi was reportedly upset about Cuomo going after his father, disgraced former Comptroller Alan Hevesi. The Assembly member declined comment.)

State Sen. Hugh Farley (R-Schenectady), who sits on both the Rules and Finance committees, said he has heard little feedback thus far concerning Sunlight’s effectiveness. Farley added that while he supported the idea initially, he would like to see more evidence of the project’s public usefulness before signing off on any more money.

“It’s a user-friendly website, I’m told,” Farley said. “But they ought to justify their effectiveness.”

Cutting the project’s budget this year could hurt the attorney general’s efforts to publicize the site with the public, which advocates say has been lacking since the project’s launch a year ago.

“People don’t know it exists,” Horner said. “It could be more useful to more people if mechanisms were developed to alert the public to its existence.”

Transparency advocates say that with the transfer of power in the State Senate, Project Sunlight is more relevant and necessary than ever.

“When one party controls government, the entirety of government, as it is here in New York State, the more vigilant, the more transparent government needs to be,” said Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the League of Women Voters of New York. Bartoletti said her members report using Sunlight extensively.

“If a citizen were to use all three of them together,” she said, referring to all three transparency sites—Project Sunlight, Open Book New York and See Through NY—“you would be able to find out volumes about what is going on in your government.”

Lise Bang-Jensen, a policy analyst at the Empire Center for New York State Policy, said she would like to see state expenditures added to the site, including credit payments, which she said would act as a deterrent to credit card abuse by public employees. She also wants more coordination between Sunlight and the other two transparency sites, which Bang-Jensen said would provide some cost savings.

“So everybody’s not rushing to post the same thing and wasting their money duplicating each other,” she said.

Beyond that, Bang-Jensen said, the next step is proactive disclosure, such as the law recently adopted in Mexico that requires federal agencies to post budgets, public employee salaries, contracts, grants and permits on the Internet.

“If it’s good enough for Mexico,” said Bang-Jensen, “how about New York?”

[email protected]

Celebrating his website’s first birthday, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo plans an expansion of Project Sunlight.

Basking in One Year of Sunlight,Cuomo’s Office Looks to Expand ScopeFunding cuts threaten site and effort to publicize transparency project

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BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

Doug Forand, the so-calledchemist of the Democratic takeover of the State Senate, is

not really a chemist. In fact, he majored in biology at SUNY-Binghamton, but says the nickname bestowed upon him by Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) is defi nitely more to his liking.

“Biology tends to happen,” says Forand, sitting in a noisy Tribeca café a few days before the presidential inauguration. “Chemistry is a more directive science.”

Fortunately for the Senate Democrats, Forand opted for political strategy instead of the applied sciences. Over the past two years, Forand has been the driving force behind most, if not all, of the key races that gave Senate Democrats the majority for the fi rst time in 40 years.

But the road to the majority was even less smooth than Forand had predicted. While the Democrats were able to pull off several key victories in Queens and Long Island, the upstate and Western New York campaigns did not fare as well, even with the landslide of Democratic voters who supported Barack Obama’s candidacy. In the end, Democrats were denied the super majority they had hoped was within reach.

Forand said that in some cases, they overestimated the celebrity appeal of

some of their candidates, like former boxer Joe Mesi, who lost his bid for an open Senate seat in Erie County to Michael Ranzenhofer.

Going forward, Forand knows that Democrats, with just a two-seat majority, are by no means safe. He says his mind is already on the next race, the next special election, the 2010 elections, the redistricting process and beyond.

The way to win, he says, is simple. “Campaigns are all about beating

expectations,” he says. “You win a race you’re supposed to win, nobody really

cares. You lose a race you’re supposed to lose, nobody really cares. You win a race you’re supposed to lose or you come close, then people start to notice.”

People started to take notice of Forand after he helped orchestrate Sen. Darrel Aubertine’s (D-Oswego/St. Lawrence) special election victory in the Republican-heavy district in the North Country in early 2008. He left the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee soon after, but kept the Democrats on as clients of his new Red Horse Strategies, a fi rm he started up with

partners Marc Lapidus and Nathan Smith.Last month, Red Horse expanded its

portfolio into lobbying, looking to cash in on the goodwill the fi rm has built up with Majority Leader Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) and his conference.

The goal is to make Red Horse a “full service” political shop, Forand says, complete with radio and television consulting, lobbying and campaign strategy.

Forand said he learned a lot of what he knows about political strategy from his time as a grassroots organizer, working

for groups like the New York Public Interest Research Group and the Arc of the United States, an organization that works with disabled individuals.

Working for NYPIRG gave him his fi rst taste of competition, trying to out-organize the local Young Republicans.

“You realize things about yourself as you go from job to job,” Forand says. “What I realized is I like the head-to-head nature of campaign work. I like the competitive nature.”

Wading into New York’s political waters, he got started working for the late Sen. Leonard Stavisky (D-Queens) in the mid-1990s. He subsequently worked for a long list of New York Democratic heavyweights, including then Sen. (now Council Member) Vincent Gentile (Brooklyn), former Public Advocate Mark

Green, former Sen. Martin Connor and Sen. Liz Krueger. He even logged in some hours for disgraced former Comptroller Alan Hevesi and imprisoned Queens Assembly Member Brian McLaughlin.

Those who Forand has helped into offi ce characterize him as a calming force, but one whose skills at number crunching and messaging are unparalleled.

“The man’s a genius,” said State Sen. Joseph Addabbo (D-Queens), who added that his campaign to unseat 20-year incumbent Serf Maltese was buoyed by Forand’s ability to break down voter demographics and statistics in his district with relative ease.

Sen. Brian Foley (D-Suffolk) said his victory over Republican Caesar Trunzo was made possible by Forand’s skills in organizing and creating strategies that allowed them to apply campaign cash to areas of the district where it could do the most good.

“The apportioning of resources to the areas of the district where we could harness the most votes,” Foley said, “was very, very important.”

But even with the Democrats fi nally in power—a goal Forand says has always been a dream of his—there is no time for Forand to kick back in his new home near the Gowanus Canal, even without being able to watch his beloved Jets in the playoffs. He plans to dive head-fi rst into the Council and citywide races this year, all the while keeping an eye out for any potential retiring Senate Republicans and the special elections that would follow.

City Council Member David Yassky (D-Brooklyn), who is running for New York City comptroller, has been a client. But for the moment Forand is remaining circumspect about revealing whom he plans to sign on with for 2009.

“We are in the process of meeting with a number of different candidates,” he said.

There is also candidate recruitment for 2010 to think about. Having learned many lessons from the last election cycle about voting habits of upstate New Yorkers, Forand says that the Democrats will be well-positioned going into next year’s Senate races, which will determine which party gets to control the redistricting process in 2011.

“We’re still going to use the same basic criteria,” he says. “Somebody who starts with an established political base, name recognition. Can they raise money, do they have a good story to tell, are they articulate on the issues?”

But now that they are in the majority, Democrats have lost some of their underdog sheen, which Forand admits could make devising a winning strategy more diffi cult.

“Campaign-wise, you’re always much better off being the underdog,” he says. “This is America. It’s part of what our story is. We’re the lovable losers.”

[email protected]

“You lose a race you’re sup-posed to lose, nobody really

cares,” Forand says. “You win a race you’re supposed

to lose or you come close, then people start to notice.”

Going forward, Doug Forand said he knows that Democrats, with just a two-seat majority, are by no means safe.

The Chemist of the Senate Democratic Takeover Mixes it up for ’09 and ’10Doug Forand refl ects on 2008’s mistakes and the source of his competitive spirit

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BY DAVID FREEDLANDER

“I’d offer you water but we don’t have any cups. I’d offer you coffee, but we don’t have any,” said

John Raskin, chief of staff to newly minted 28-year old State Sen. Daniel Squadron (D-Brooklyn/Manhattan) as he led the way into his boss’ new offi ce on the duo’s fi rst day in session at the statehouse.

“I’d offer to hang your coat, but we don’t have any hangers,” said Squadron, rising from the oversized leather chair that he inherited from Marty Connor, a 30-year incumbent who he ousted in a bitter and very closely watched primary.

Across a wall in his offi ce lay a bookshelf fi lled with gray legal books—Connor was known as one of the leading election lawyers in the state—but the ex-senator left the rest of the offi ce stripped bare.

A boxy, plastic intercom device that looks like it has not been updated in 40 years sits next to his desk. Mail addressed to Sen. Martin Connor still arrives and is stacked on a bookshelf.

“Let’s see if the printer works. Oooh, look at that,” Squadron says as embossed heavy grade paper comes out. “Look at the watermark. I hope we’re not paying for that. And if the state is paying for that then we’re in trouble.”

The deal with the Gang of Three had coalesced less than a week before, and rather than settling into Connor’s old digs, Squadron was waiting to make the move down the hall to the majority offi ces. It was a journey his predecessor, who spent 30 years in the Senate, never had the chance to make.

During the campaign, nearly every

Democratic member of the Senate stood on the steps of New York’s City Hall to endorse Squadron’s opponent. Now, not but four months later, he was quickly becoming the most popular guy in the room, the bright light destined to lead the party for decades to come.

“I do feel kind of like I replaced a favorite camp counselor late in the summer,” Squadron says. “Look at me. I showed up out of nowhere and took on a Democratic incumbent. A lot of people didn’t like the way I did this. People are worried to say the least, but there is this feeling [among fellow legislators] that it’s not up to us. We are colleagues because the people in each district sent us here.”

So now there is work to be done. Squadron made a round of phone calls

and sent out a press release on Brooklyn Bridge Park, a contentious urban renewal project that Squadron pledged to resolve during the campaign.

“I’m new to this. I don’t know how relevant I am, and if I’m not they’ll do what they want to do, but if I am, I want to do something about it.”

Soon, Raskin reappeared with exciting news: He had discovered a free messenger system.

“Apparently, though, it’s uncouth to use it in the Legislative Offi ce Building,” Raskin said.

In the meantime, he plugged in a fl ash drive to Squadron’s computer to move some information over from his own. The two were still waiting on their e-mail addresses.

“Solving problems. That’s what we do here,” Squadron said.

There have been other adjustments. He is, for the time being, staying with Assembly

Member Brian Kavanaugh (D-Manhattan) until he gets his own place in Albany. He bought a car to make the weekly trek to Albany better from his home in Carroll Gardens and hooked it up with a speaker phone in order to work while on the road.

“It’s like the spaceship I always wanted,” he said.

Eventually comes the fi rst real challenge of Squadron’s fi rst full day on the job in Albany: fi nding his way around the labyrinthine Capitol to get lunch.

“I get the feeling that if I died up here they wouldn’t fi nd me for days,” he says on the way out of the offi ce.

In the hallways he runs into, Assembly Member Michael Cusick (D-Staten Island), a fellow Schumer alum.

“First day, huh, senator?” said Cusick. “Ah, I remember my fi rst day.”

Like most visitors to the Capitol, Squadron is not happy with the in-house dining options.

“You’d think there would be a nice food court. Maybe like a Pantera or something. Maybe that’s the fi rst Cusick-Squadron bill.”

“You got big plans,” Cusick banters back. “I like that. We are going to change Albany.”

Later in the day, after closed-door meetings with the Democratic caucus and a similar one among chiefs of staff in which the aides were reminded to be gracious and polite to their Republican rivals, avoid excessive crowing and not fret about moving offi ces, Squadron attended his fi rst legislative session as a senator.

Cleaning up Albany’s notoriously secretive ways was a consistent theme of his campaign, and the Democrats had just passed far-reaching reforms—not as far as some good government groups may have

liked but further than had been achieved since, well, ever.

A little nervously, he rose to speak on the measures.

“It’s a great honor to be standing for the fi rst time, speaking for the fi rst time about this issue in this house,” he said. “Certainly, this is not a day where we can wave a magic wand and fi x everything not working about Albany.”

He paused. “The rules are not something the

people of this state spend a lot of time thinking about, but the rules of this body affect people from across the state,” he said. “Today is the beginning of real change because of concern that it must happen and will happen.”

“Thank you, Senator Squadron,” the presiding offi cer said. “And congratulations on your fi rst day.”

[email protected]

Finally able to take his seat in the State Senate, Daniel Squadron had a fi rst day of session, which includ-ed a proposal to bring a Panera to the Capitol and his fi rst speech on rules reform.

Mr. Squadron Arrives in AlbanyA Printer, Lunch and Ethics Reform All Tackled on Day One of Session

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The Effective End of Legal Racial Profi lingFarag v. United StatesDecided by: United States District Court, Brooklyn, Nov. 24

In a ruling that analogized the police work of the NYPD to the incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II, a federal judge in Brooklyn held that New York state and federal counterterrorism offi cials could be personally liable for the illegal arrest of Arab men. The ruling follows from the events of Aug. 22, 2004, when former NYPD offi cer Tarik Farag and his friend Amro Elmasry were arrested by 10 armed SWAT offi cers at Kennedy Airport.

Farag and Elmasry, both Americans of Arab descent, were returning from a vacation in San Diego when FBI Agent William Plunkett and NYPD Detective Thomas Smith began following the two men. On their New York-bound fl ight, Farag and Elmasry, who were seated one row apart, spoke in Arabic to each other and asked a fl ight attendant if there were two open seats where they could be seated together. Agents Plunkett and Smith also

noted in their report that Elmasry suspiciously checked his watch several times during the fi ve-hour fl ight and used the lavatory once. As the plane approached New York, the agents asked the captain to request an arrest team at the gate.

Farag and Elmasry sued Plunkett and Smith in federal court alleging numerous constitutional violations from their arrest. The NYPD and federal offi cers tried to dismiss the claims stating that the plaintiffs’ Arabic ethnicity “is and was a relevant factor” in making the arrest legal.

In a long, articulated opinion, Judge Frederic Block shot down every argument the agents offered for the legality of their actions. The court held that race cannot be used as a factor to establish criminal propensity for the purpose of arrest.

Citing the dissent from Korematsu

v. United States, the now-ridiculed case that upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans, Judge Block wrote, “Fear cannot

be a factor to allow for the evisceration of the bedrock principle of our Constitution that no one can be arrested without probable cause that a crime has been committed.” Barring reversal, the ruling

stands as a block to racial-profi ling arrests in New York terrorism cases.

Intent To Offend Not Enough To DisbarIn re LeverDecided by: Appellate Division, First Department, Dec. 30

Can someone be a registered sex offender and an attorney? For now, the answer in New York is “Yes.”

Steven Lever, a New York attorney and now-registered sex offender, pled guilty to having sexually explicit Internet conversations with a 13-year-old girl (played by an undercover police offi cer) and traveling to engage in sex with a minor.

After his guilty plea, Lever was referred

to the Bar’s Disciplinary Committee to determine if his acts warranted disbarment.

Distinguishing Lever’s case from several other sex-offense cases where attorneys were disbarred or indefi nitely suspended, the Appellate Division handed Lever a three-year suspension of his law license. The court said Lever’s case warranted a light sentence because he never had direct contact with a minor. After all, Lever had been arrested on the way to the minor’s supposed home.

This result drew a scathing dissent from Judge James Catterson, who believed the more important fact for the court was Lever’s intent. However, Catterson noted an absence of guidance on this issue in New York law. He seemed to urge a statement from the Court of Appeals, noting that courts “are charged with protecting both the courts and the public from unfi t attorneys, and even attorney discipline must have some absolutes, some event horizon that dictates disbarment.” So far, though, no word from the Court of Appeals.

—James McDonald

www.nycapitolnews.com22 January 2009 THE CAPITOL

The Man Who Once Held Clinton’s Seat Still Has Some Things To SayAt 85, James Buckley reflects on beating the last appointed senator

By Chris Bragg

“I’m always surprised whensomeone remembers me,” said James Buckley when reached

at his Sharon, Conn., home one recent afternoon.

Now 85, the former U.S. Senator from New York is accustomed to being overlooked. Born on an elevator of the New York City Women’s Hospital in 1923, Buckley never achieved the fame of his younger brother William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review and the intellectual force behind modern conservatism.

But the older Buckley, who served one term as senator from New York between 1971 and 1977, was a key figure in every step of that movement, according to state Conservative Party chair Mike Long.

“He wasn’t a headline figure,” Long said. “But he was a man of great strength, with great intellectual thrust.”

In 1970, Buckley became the first and only member of the Conservative Party ever elected to the Senate, and the last minor-party candidate elected to that body (there have been unaffiliated senators since, including current Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, both of whom were elected as Independents). He was the plaintiff in the landmark 1976 Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo, in which the court ruled that campaign contributions are a protected form of free speech.

To get his Senate seat, Buckley beat Charles Goodell, the last person prior to Kirsten Gillibrand to be appointed to the Senate from New York. Following Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (R) tapped Goodell, a liberal Republican congressman with a fierce opposition to the Vietnam War. He served the last two years of Kennedy’s term before being defeated in re-election in a race that also featured former John F. Kennedy aide Theodore Sorensen as the Democratic nominee.

Buckley believes Rockefeller picked Goodell under the assumption that his fairly liberal voting record in the House would be a strong indicator of future votes in the Senate. When that proved to be the case, Buckley ran strongly to the right of Goodell, emphasizing his anti-communist beliefs in the 1970 campaign, which proved to be dominated by Vietnam.

Long said that Buckley’s election to the Senate in 1970 was a key moment for conservatives.

“I think his election on the Conservative line alone, gaining over two million votes, sent a very clear message to New York, and, actually, the entire nation,” said Long, who campaigned for Buckley in his 1970 and 1976 Senate races. “He was a very

solid, reassuring voice for Americans. A voice for the ‘silent majority.’”

Buckley says because he had never held public office before first running in 1968 for the state’s other Senate seat, he empathizes with Caroline Kennedy, who has been criticized in some circles for her lack of government experience.

“The same thing, of course, could have been said about me,” said Buckley, “except my views on the issues were well known.”

Buckley served only one term, losing in 1976 to Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He then moved to Connecticut, running for Senate again, only to lose to Democrat Christopher Dodd in 1980.

But the former senator stayed involved in the conservative movement

long after leaving the Senate, serving as under-secretary of state in the Reagan administration and, for 12 years, on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. When he left the court, his seat on the bench was filled by John Roberts, now the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Reflecting on his time in the Senate, Buckley expresses a sense that his work was unfinished because many of the issues the country faced during the 1970s remain problems today. “Energy, the environment, religion, foreign entanglement,” he said. “Need I go on?”

Buckley has been fully retired for eight years, living in Sharon, a town of about 3,000 in northwest Connecticut, with his wife, Ann Cooley Buckley. He says he does not pay too much attention to New York politics anymore. For instance, Buckley said, he had not really kept up with the circus surrounding who Gov. David Paterson (D) would appoint to his former Senate seat.

“I have no idea about it,” Buckley said. “It’s been many, many years since I was in the Senate.”

Buckley’s current project is putting together a book of his speeches and articles on conservative philosophy, following on the heels of a memoir he wrote in 2006, Gleanings from an Unplanned Life. In that book, Buckley

admits that his childhood ambition was not to live in the public eye, but to be a country lawyer.

In other words, Buckley has no plans to mount a comeback now that his old Senate seat has opened up again.

“I’m now 85 years old,” Buckley said. “That tells you about all you need to know.”

After losing the 1970 election to Buckley, meanwhile, Goodell returned to practicing law in Washington, D.C. Goodell would later sit on a commission formed by President Gerald Ford that drafted rules granting amnesty to draft dodgers.

Goodell died in 1987. He is survived by his son, Roger Goodell, the current commissioner of the National Football League.

[email protected]

“He wasn’t a headline figure,”

said Mike Long, chair of the

Conservative Party of New York. “But

he was a man of great strength.”

James Buckley, now 85, beat the last person before Kirsten Gillibrand to be appointed to what became Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat. He served one term.

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Paul Tonko waited to the last second to enter the very crowded race to succeed Rep. Michael Mc-Nulty (D-Albany), but he was always favored to

win, which he did, cruising to a nearly 30 point win over a Schenectady County GOP legislator. A former chair of the Assembly Energy Committee and former head of the New York State Energy Research and De-velopment Authority, Tonko wants to make his time in office about reforming the state’s energy policies, which he hopes to collaborate on with David Pater-son, his former boss. Tonko reflected on Paterson’s proposal to increase renewable energy consumption, how to increase energy research during a recession and the unique challenges of representing the capital region.

What follows is an edited transcript.

The Capitol: What do you hope to accomplish in your first year in Congress?Paul Tonko: It’s obvious that we have an economy that’s very weakened. And that needs to be addressed with a number of jolts—to use the president’s terminology—to the economy. Repairing that fractured economy is a high priority. Putting together the regulatory aspects that are required. … Creating and retaining jobs in the district has always resonated high, highest on the list established by the electorate. And so that goes hand in hand. Obviously there are many strengths in the region, in the congressio-nal district. Many of them are driven by an energy reform agenda with nanotechnology and SuperPower with its superconductive cable, GE with its wind institute, NY-SERDA with its STEP Park in the region. … You know the vast array of public and private sector campuses, not only the four-year schools and graduate courses, but certainly the community colleges which have been there to train and retrain the green power work force. … And investing in research and development, so that these en-ergy concepts can put people to work in a green-collar capacity, and while so doing, as we initiate those jobs onto the radar screen, we will assist those traditional white- and blue-collar varieties of jobs out there to be saved simply by efficiency and new technology that will be introduced for our existing white- and blue-collar tra-ditional jobs. Though I think that agenda then creates a very sound approach to sparking an innovation econo-my. All driven by energy reforms.

TC: One of the main features of Governor Paterson’s State of the State speech was a proposal to have 45 percent of the electricity generated in the state come from clean and renewable sources by 2015. How will you be working with the governor specifically?PT: Well, we hope to work hand in hand with the gov-ernor because I was part of his team before I left to run for this role, as president and CEO of NYSERDA. And having worked with Speaker Silver as energy chair in the

Assembly, you know my partnership with the executive and legislative branches on energy reform was very de-fined and very positive.

TC: Does that include receiving money from the federal government, specifically from President Obama’s proposed stimulus package?PT: Well, certainly I would want to make that my goal. So that we could take a lot of this technology and investment, the kind of tone that can be established where energy effi-ciency becomes our fuel of choice, would be a tremendous mindset. And, you know, I see these very difficult times and the enormous challenges that confront all of us as also golden opportunities. And these golden opportunities can come in a green format as we move forward and grow jobs, as we save jobs in that white- and blue-collar realm. And do it in a way that thinks outside the barrel—because we cannot be beholden to an oil-based economy. We have to begin to transition. And when you do that, you not only grow energy and environmental policy to a positive new realm, but you also respond to national security, because we drop down our dependency on fossil fuels imported at times from our most troubled spots in the world and we

also grow our energy security. You know, so many have suggested that we’re in the Mideast over oil. So as we wean away from that sort of commodity and grow with our own brainpower here, new op-tions come by embracing our intellectual capacity. We can get a lot done.

TC: How can you request funds for energy im-provements when the economy is so fragile?PT: Except the tone has been established that we need to reform. And you know the beauty of the executive branch is that you have within your grasp the ability to set the tone, the bully pulpit

of executives like President Obama, like Governor Pat-erson, will allow for a great tone to be established, a very positive tone, and we go forward with a full-fledged effort to respond to the cleaning up of our energy policy, which is innovative and inventive and efficient and effective. So you know, it’s all about priorities, it’s about commit-ting, and it’s about tone that’s established. You’ve had the Assembly, through the speaker, and Congress, through Speaker Pelosi, all being very supportive. So I think that

you know, we can really work hard to try and bring all of that, together and remind people of the strengths here of greening up our policy, not only in terms of savings that come energy-wise and dollar-wise but jobs that grow in a green dimension, in a green variety, that are added to the traditional white and blue, that are made less risky simply by the addition of green-collar workers who will help save white- and blue-collar workers’ jobs.

TC: How does the fact that the state capital is in your district make your job unique?PT: Well, I don’t know if it’s more unique. I think one of the benefits of the capital region is that there’s a lot of information feed coming through the media simply be-cause it’s the hub of activity, so you’re there front line, receiving all the latest discussion and dialogue that is occurring

TC: Obviously a lot of your constituents are public sector employees. How are they going to be affected by the budget deficits?PT: I think that, you know, the kind of investment you just talked about, the kind of demographics of a number of public sector employees living in the capital region, these are people often very much touched with public policy, public policy development. And so I think you have an au-dience then that sees the value of developing policy that is very strong and very cutting-edge in nature. … Obvi-ously, the struggles at each of the state capitols with re-sources then bears a great challenge to all of us here in Washington to respond to the needs of states. And I know that Speaker Pelosi and other leaders in the House and members like myself have been pushing very hard for out-comes that will relieve states of many of the responsibili-ties facing them that are threatened by revenue reduction at home. And so we want to make certain that, again, the economic stimulus package is done with a high degree of urgency and done with a great deal of effectiveness.

TC: Even though you’re a freshman member of Con-gress, any hard feelings at being passed over for consideration for the Senate seat?PT: No.

—By Andrew J. Hawkins [email protected]

: Plugged In

“I see these very difficult times and the enormous

challenges that confront all of us as also golden

opportunities. These golden opportunities can come in a green format.”

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The January 1,2009 Issue of The Capitol

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