Of bad apples and a rotten tree

How Albany created the opportunity for corruption

Another month, more criminal charges, this time against key players in Gov. Cuomo’s office, with millions in public funds allegedly steered to insiders. We’ll await the outcome of the federal trials before knowing whether any individual is culpable for specific crimes.

But this isn’t a simple story about bad apples. There’s something wrong with the tree.

Systems create opportunities for criminals to exploit. Albany knowingly created the ecosystem of giveaways and favoritism described in U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s indictments. Government officials set up taxpayerfunded “economic development” boondoggles — run by off-thebooks, largely unaccountable, private, not-for-profit corporations.

They need to be rooted out, now.

At the heart of the criminal accusation is a claim government officials rigged bidding requirements for several huge upstate economic development contracts to assure that they would be given to particular businessmen who in return paid them off.

Generally speaking, we have laws to stop this. Since the days of Boss Tweed, we’ve had a robust system of statutes requiring public bidding, public disclosure and independent outside contract review to assure bid-rigging doesn’t happen.

But those laws apply only to government entities and government contracts.

The Cuomo administration created obscure, Enron-like, not-for-profit corporations run by insiders — with names like the Fort Schuyler Management Corp.

Next it handed them huge amounts of public money and property to dispose of as they chose.

For purposes of criminal indictments, it doesn’t matter that public money and public decisions were run through private, front corporations. Bribery is bribery. But if we want to stop these schemes in the future, we need to apply the same checks and balances to public funds no matter where they’re spent.

Graft is only one of the problems with this boondoggle. New York is spending billions in taxpayer dollars on economic development projects. The biggest spender, Empire State Development, has increased its grants by one-third since 2016, to $739 million, including projects mired in the corruption scandal.

Favored private corporations get cash, tax preferences and cheap electricity and land, costing the state $4 billion in 2016, the Citizens Budget Commission calculates.

The projects are supposed to create jobs and economic activity that wouldn’t happen without the massive subsidies. But there is almost no evidence of job creation commensurate with the huge amounts of public dollars put into private pockets.

In the long run, this kind of waste is even more damaging to the state than an outbreak of corruption.

Fixing the problem isn’t complicated. First, new laws should reinstate public bidding and disclosure for all state-funded projects. The Legislature and state controller also need to step up oversight of executive branch initiatives.

Mainly, we need to end the practice of massive private- sector giveaways in the name of economic development. They don’t work and invite bad behavior.

There’s an opportunity for Cuomo here. He’s been wounded personally and politically by the indictments because the people involved were close to him, and because the economic development projects are signature initiatives, bragged about widely and continuously.

The governor can and should toss this failed system onto the scrap heap, diminishing opportunity for crime — and saving New Yorkers’ precious tax dollars in the process.