Last days for LLC loophole?

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How long does the LLC loophole have left — weeks, months or maybe ... slightly longer?

To recap: This notorious breach in New York’s campaign finance laws allows political donors to multiply the maximum amount of their largesse by funneling it through every limited liability company they control. For real estate companies and other businesses structured with a lot of LLCS, the loophole makes it far easier to gain the favor of elected officials.

It’s been a rough year for the LLC loophole, which earned bad press in the trials or retrials of corrupt officials including former gubernatorial aide Joe Percoco, ex-assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and erstwhile state Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos. In the Percoco trial, star witness and noted bagman Todd Howe testified that he once advised executives at Syracusebased COR Development on the proper use of their various entities to support Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s campaign — including this pro tip: Don’t donate through LLCS that have “COR” in their names, thus making them more visible to meddling journalists.

The Democrat-dominated state Assembly has passed LLC closure laws regularly, only to see the measures die in the Republican-led Senate. Cuomo has been consistent in calling for the end of the loophole, but slightly less energetic about actually getting it done. This might be due to the fact that he has raked in far more money from LLCS than any other candidate.

Now, I would never, be so cynical as to suggest that Senate Democrats, having regained the majority for the first time in eight years, would fail to fulfill one of their signature reform promises. Especially when their majority in January will boast at least 39 members.

That’s the largest majority for Democrats in more than a century, as tallied by Politico’s sabermetrician Bill Mahoney. Its size means that incoming Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-cousins will have a significant advantage over previous Democratic Senate chieftains like Malcolm Smith and John Sampson (other than the fact that she’s not a criminal): Whenever the new leader is confronted by the sort of hostagetaking demand that abounds in bare majorities —

— Stewart-cousins can tell them in no uncertain terms to go pound sand. That’s conference discipline, not bossism.

Senate Democratic spokesman Mike Murphy assured me that the conference wants to shut down the loophole “quickly, along with other reforms.” Cuomo’s spokesman Rich Azzopardi said the governor wants the job done “as soon as possible.”

But just to indulge you selfstigmatizing paranoiacs — who are no doubt shuddering and

spilling coffee and shouting at your spouse or dog that neither of those assurances include a hard timeline — let’s examine some of the ways the tumbrel carrying the LLC loophole to the guillotine might be diverted.

Maybe it will bog down in a task force charged with looking at comprehensive reforms. This is a favorite Cuomo technique, which he has used to address everything from municipal financial woes and the Common Core educational standards to the reduction of plastic bags. But in the matter of ethics and campaign finance reform, New York taxpayers have already footed the bill for a task force, which was called the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption.

You may recall that the panel — including numerous district attorneys and la creme de la

of reform advocates — failed to complete all of its work before it was smothered by the governor, Skelos and Silver. It succeeded, however, in completing a December 2013 preliminary report that was damning in its findings and comprehensive in its prescriptions for reform. The very first bullet point in the press release summarizing its findings included the elimination of the LLC loophole.

Well, yeah, but that was five years ago — maybe we need a new task force? Nope. Alas, almost all of the conditions described in the Moreland Commission’s report still obtain. Where the governor and the Legislature have made moves in the direction of following its recommendations, they have often fallen short: The report, for example, recommended the creation of “an entirely new, structurally independent election and campaign finance law enforcement agency.” Instead, what New Yorkers got was the installation of Risa Sugarman as enforcement counsel at the Board of Elections. Her tenure has been rocky, in large part due to the board’s disdain for the modicum of independence granted to her. Indeed, the commissioners recently moved to reduce Sugarman’s autonomy to conduct investigations, an action that drew token, mousef latulence-volume protests from elected officials.

Then again, perhaps some Democrats will make the argument that eliminating the loophole would advantage wealthy candidates who have less need to raise campaign funds, or postcitizens United independent expenditure campaigns mounted by equally monied interests. This anti-plutocracy argument would be more convincing, though, if the LLC loophole wasn’t one of the preferred method used by the fattest cats to game the system.

They will lose this one — maybe not by Valentine’s Day, but almost certainly by Independence Day.