Capitol offenses
Unlike a slew of very guilty Capitol pols justly arrested for corruption, our wholly innocent Albany bureau chief, Ken Lovett, was in police custody for less than an hour Wednesday before walking out free, accompanied by his self-proclaimed “pro bono counsel” Andrew Cuomo.
Lovett’s misadventure with the Senate sergeant-at-arms and state troopers over his wholly legal use of a cellphone when the body was out of session happened because he was trying to find out, for 19 million New Yorkers, what the hell is going on with the $168 billion state budget.
Thursday is the last day to approve a timely budget before the Legislature’s Easter and Passover holiday, and even after Lovett was freed, no one knew what was in and what was out or why.
That’s because Cuomo and the boss men (yes, they’re all men) of the Assembly and Senate freeze out not just the public and the press and the minority parties, but their own members.
The members don’t know what is being traded for what; they rely on lobbyists passing around drafts. As for taxpayers, they may as well be cuffed and kept in a locked room.
What about the single biggest issue for the biggest city in the country, fixing the broken subways?
Our tally of all city Assembly members shows a solid majority for congestion pricing — starting with installing E-ZPass readers and imposing a surcharge on taxi and Uber fares to fund the trains.
And why was Cuomo pushing a distracting and dangerously overbroad plan to give the MTA sweeping rights to claim a chunk of city property taxes without City Hall’s full buy in?
Another bad idea, which came out of nowhere with the speed of a bullet train, is Cuomo’s apparent last-second push to bigfoot the city on redeveloping a zone of Midtown around Penn Station.
The power grab, which Cuomo’s spokesperson says is being misinterpreted, wouldn't even address the area's biggest problem, the seedy station and its stumblebum landlord, Amtrak.
Then there was Brooklyn Sen. Simcha Felder trying an overnight rewrite of state education law to let religious and private schools escape even the lightest government oversight on providing basics like English and math and history. Do not dare.
What makes the eleventh-hour mischief especially infuriating is that a dozen long-overdue big ideas, which were supposed to be gubernatorial priorities, have seemingly fallen by the wayside.
While it didn’t affect Lovett’s freedom, what happened to the idea to eliminate cash bail, and overhaul unjust criminal court discovery rules? Off the table? Early voting, to up participation? In the trash? Or the Child Victims Act, allowing those sexually abused as kids to pursue justice past the outrageously restrictive current statute of limitations. It has majority support but never comes to a vote.
Pols put a long list of promised policy fixes in purgatory while blindsiding voters with pet priorities. This is Albany.