Cuomo’s Rx for Corruption

The Buffalo Billion case heads to the jury this week. Whatever the verdicts, the trial has further exposed the massive corruption of Gov. Cuomo’s economic-development apparatus — which continues to chug along without reform.

The czar of the Buffalo effort, SUNY Polytechnic Institute ex-prez Alain Kaloyeros, stands accused of rigging the bidding process to steer contracts worth over $850 million to two companies whose executives are major Cuomo donors. The gov hasn’t been accused of any wrongdoing himself — but his name has loomed huge throughout.

At this point, there’s no question the bid-rigging took place. The defense is simply trying to cast the blame on figures who’ve already pled guilty and turned state’s evidence — especially on lobbyist Todd Howe, a decades-long Cuomo crony.

It’s also clear that Kaloyeros hired Howe to get in good with the gov after Cuomo took office in 2011. Cuomo ex-aide David Doyle even testified that the governor’s office only agreed to leave Kaloyeros in his job after Howe came in to serve as Cuomo’s “eyes and ears.”

Howe himself didn’t testify, since he was a disaster in the last Cuomo-administration corruption trial: He got caught committing credit-card fraud while providing evidence against Joe Percoco, the gov’s longtime right-hand man — though Percoco was still found guilty on multiple charges.

But the simple fact is that Howe never had the power to rig those contracts: Kalayeros’ office, if not Kalayeros himself, had to do that.

And even if he escapes conviction, Kalayeros’ Cuomo-era record as economic genius is terrible: On top of the $750 million he sunk into the white-elephant SolarCity plant in Buffalo, he dumped $55 million into a dud IBM innovation center and $15 million into that failed film hub outside Syracuse. All this from the man Cuomo used to call New York’s “secret weapon.”

Meanwhile, as the Albany Times Union’s Rachel Silberstein pointed out last month, the governor himself has never gotten around to taking the immediate, unilateral steps to clean up his economic-development programs as he promised when these scandals first broke.

Those reforms included banning campaign donations from companies bidding for state contracts as well as naming a “chief procurement officer” to oversee all Executive Branch contracts.

Back then, he called them “actions I can take under my own authority.” Instead, he packaged the changes with similar reforms for spending by the Legislature and asked state lawmakers to OK them all — which they . . . didn’t.

So he’s still taking donations from firms that want to do business with the state.

Oh, and the gov is also widely seen as the force who persuaded the Assembly not to pass two bills pushed by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli giving

him the power to oversee economic-development outlays. (The Republican-led Senate passed both with broad bipartisan support.)

Bottom line: Andrew Cuomo set out to spend taxpayer billions in the name of economic development, outside the normal controls on state spending. Many of the contracts then went to enrich his donors in familiar “pay to play” fashion — and at least two of his closest associates took the opportunity to line their own pockets.

And when the feds moved in with indictments, Cuomo promised reforms that he then never took and stood in the way of other efforts to make sure it didn’t happen again.

He’s even still taking donations that he tacitly acknowledges carry the air (at least) of corruption. And the projects themselves have routinely failed to provide the jobs he’d promised.

We shudder to think what a third Cuomo term might bring.