Cuomo, lawmakers try to move forward
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state legislators try to shift the focus away from the Sheldon Silver scandal.
ALBANY » Putting a week of truly monumental Albany scandal behind them, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislators are now eager to get the 2015 session back on track.
“This was a crisis what we just went through,” Cuomo admitted during a stop Wednesday in Syracuse, talking about the arrest of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and his ouster as leader. “This was an embarrassment. This was a crisis. ... Respond to the crisis.”
To do so, Cuomo has linked signing off on a new state budget to reforms that include more disclosure of outside income of state officials and restrictions on how campaign
money can be raised and spent. How that will play out remains unclear, but both the Senate and Assembly members said they are ready to get back to work. Among them are newly-elected Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, D-Bronx.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us and not a lot of time ... I can’t wait to get started,” Heastie said at his first press conference
Tuesday after winning the leader’s job.
Added Senate majority spokesman Scott Reif on Friday, “We’re hopeful we’ll be able to do the fifth straight on-time budget.” Hearings are under way on the spending plan
and “we’re on schedule,” he added.
The budget is due on April 1, and there is a host of other important issues that have been held hostage by Albany’s numerous problems with corruption and criminal conduct. The list includes a possible legislative response to the death of Eric Garner while New York City police officers were trying to arrest him last July and the subsequent revenge assassination of two New York City police officers by a deranged gunman — tragedies that dominated the headlines until the scandals changed the story line of the 2015 session.
Also waiting in the wings is Cuomo’s State of Opportunity agenda, which takes in such disparate proposals as a $1 billion broadband Internet program for rural areas,
$1.7 billion in tax credits for homeowners who qualify under income limits and an unorthodox competition to split $1.5 billion in state economic development grants upstate.
The grants program has come under fire for dividing upstate into seven economic development regions, with three winners and four losers to be decided by Team Cuomo.
Cuomo also is eager to push through tougher standards for teacher evaluations to get rid of bad educators in failing schools, tying the change to increasing state aid to local school districts. On top of that, there are proposals to raise the minimum wage, Cuomo’s ethics reform package and two important judicial nominations.
The Court of Appeals opened 2015 with two vacancies, and Senate Judiciary Committee hearings are scheduled for Monday on Cuomo’s nominees Leslie Stein and Eugene Fahey. A vote on Stein, an Albany area appellate judge, could come on Monday as well.
All those matters and more ended up in limbo as a result of the cascading scandals that began with the Jan. 22 arrest of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver on bribery and
kickback charges. He was replaced by Heastie on Feb. 3.
No soon had the leadership void been filled than more bad news arrived with the conviction of former Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith on bribery charges and the announcement of a $580,000 settlement to two former Assembly staffers who were sexually harassed by former Assembly member Vito Lopez, who was also Brooklyn Democratic boss at the time.
The settlement raised to $715,000 paid out to Lopez’s victims, as well as $1 million in legal bills paid by taxpayers to defend Lopez and Silver, who was accused of enabling Lopez’s abuse by doing nothing when told of his sexual activities involving aides.
Smith, who was defeated in a Democratic primary last fall, faces decades in prison for trying to bribe Republican leaders into giving him the nomination to run for New York
City mayor in 2013. Three other men, all GOP leaders, were convicted in the scheme.