State Senate Plays Politics with Pay Equity

Posted by Julie Bolcer at 6:20 PM, April 17, 2008

Accessorized in red to signify indebtedness, pay equity advocates rallied at City Hall on Thursday morning to support state and federal legislation to bridge the long-standing income gap between women and men who perform comparable work. But in terms of political theater, that City Hall protest had nothing on what happened in Albany earlier this week.

The coalition, Equal Pay NYC, joined City Councilmember Helen Sears (D-Jackson Heights), chair of the Women’s Issues committee, for a news conference prior to a Council hearing on two pay equity resolutions. Their calls anticipate Equal Pay Day on April 22, which symbolizes the time when women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the previous year.

“When women dominate an industry, or a line of work, the pay goes down,” said Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW-NYC. “Even in the New York school districts,” she added, “the cleaners, which are dominated by men, make more than the women-dominated teacher assistants and secretaries who help run the schools.”

Infuriating examples aside, proponents may just as well have worn red to demonstrate their outrage toward a specious piece of pay equity legislation passed in the State Senate on Monday. The bill sponsored by Senator Joseph Robach (R-Greece), chair of the Labor Committee, would have the Department of Labor study the reasons for pay differences between men and women and minorities, and it would increase penalties for employers that practice wage discrimination.

In other words, pay equity supporters say, Robach would give lip service to pay equity in an election year. The third-term senator from the Rochester area is a 2008 target of Democrats seeking his seat in the upper chamber where Republicans hold a slim but powerful two-seat majority.

“That legislation is nothing more than an attempt to get attention for a marginal member,” said State Senator Craig Johnson (D-Port Washington), who dismissed the Robach maneuver in a telephone interview on Wednesday. Johnson sponsors another piece of legislation, the New York State Fair Pay Act, considered by supporters to be a more genuine solution to the problem. Although the Fair Pay Act has passed the Democrat-controlled Assembly every year since 2002, it has repeatedly expired in the Senate Labor Committee.

So pay equity proponents were surprised when labor committee chair Robach, historically an opponent, appeared at a rally in Albany on April 3 and expressed his support for ending wage discrimination. But according to accounts, he did not commit to moving the Fair Pay Act out of committee. Instead, he later shocked pay equity supporters by crafting the dubious pay equity study bill that was rushed through committee and onto the floor for a vote on Monday. He effectively beat to the punch Johnson, who had planned to motion to petition the Fair Pay Act for a vote on Tuesday.

“It’s inexcusable what the Senate majority did,” fumed Johnson.

To add insult to paycheck injury, when Johnson made his motion to petition on Tuesday, Robach and other Republicans simply walked out of the chamber to avoid going on the record about the Fair Pay Act. Watch this video of the incident from the Albany Times Union's Capitol Confidential blog.

The study on the causes of pay inequity is due by May 1, 2009, nearly six months after the fall elections. Convenient.

Lobbying Albany: A Recession-Proof Industry

Posted by Duncan Meisel at 4:25 PM, April 17, 2008

Wall Street may be taking a beating recently, but at least one other New York industry seems recession-proof: lobbying. Once again, spending on lobbying broke records, with an all-time high of $171.2 million spent on influencing state lawmakers, according to the Commission on Public Integrity which released its annual report on lobbying of the New York State legislature.

Year-over-year increases in spending by lobbyists aren’t anything new, but some of the groups at the top of the list of big spenders were new: Verizon communications topped the list with $3.2 million spent while Columbia University was second with $2.3 million.

“In the aggregate, it is a banner year, but I have seen years when more money was spent by individual interest groups” said Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group. “This is one industry that always spends more than the year before in aggregate.”

The rest of the top ten went as follows:

3. United Teachers $2.1 million
4. O'Brien & Gere Limited $1.6 million
5. Greater NY Hospital Association $1.6 million
6. Healthcare Association of New York State $1.5 million
7. Medical Society of the State of New York $1.5 million
8. Forest City Ratner Companies $1.2 million
9. Trial Lawyers Association $959,733
10. United Federation of Teachers $876,952

“What was surprising was that it was Verizon, not the amount that was spent” Horner said. “Typically when you see big bucks being spent by a corporation in Albany, they’re trying to block something from happening.”

In this case, Verizon was attempting to prevent the establishment of statewide ‘video franchising’ laws which regulate the power of local governments to control the cable television market, targeting, among other bills, the introduced but unpassed Omnibus Telecommunications Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2007 written by Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D–Westchester).

That bill would have granted a statewide license to Verizon for its FiOS Internet and television service, but subjected the company to net neutrality and build out requirements that the company opposed. Groups like Consumer’s Union supported the bill, saying that it would have introduced more competition and preserved innovation on the internet.

“Industry can almost present a brick wall to stop whatever legislation they don’t like," said Chuck Bell of Consumer’s Union, which spent a few thousand lobbying in favor of the bill. "We have no easy way to marshal the collective economic interests of consumers to compete with Verizon. As consumers, we’re dispersed and we can’t counteract them.”

Bloomberg and the Press Give Joe Bruno a Pass on Congestion Pricing

Posted at 10:33 AM, April 15, 2008

By Shaunna Murphy, Shea O’Rourke, Marguerite A. Suozzi

Tabloid headlines and even New York Times editorials echoed City Hall last week in targeting Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver as the one-man wrecking crew who obstructed Mike Bloomberg’s congestion pricing program. The mayor’s post-defeat scapegoating, however, has been as politically tilted as his pre-defeat contributions. The mayor has written checks totaling half a million dollars to Senate Republican boss Joe Bruno, who, like Silver, never brought the traffic plan to the floor yet miraculously became “the invisible man” in all the finger-pointing that followed.

Since congestion pricing's defeat, The Times has called Silver "unworthy of his office." "Here was a chance for Silver to show some real leadership," Schenectady's Daily Gazette railed. "His shortsightedness will cost the city $354 million in federal funds," Newsday piped in.

And the mayor certainly isn't going out of his way to refute the blame. His deputy mayor, Kevin Sheekey, told New York 1 that Silver has not been an effective leader in the past week. "I don't see any courage in Albany," he added. Bloomberg also made several statements implicating Silver as the main culprit. "I do not think that any one person should decide what's right," the mayor said at a press conference at Georgetown University.

But others find the finger-pointing unwarranted. "The editorial attacks on Shelly [Silver] are totally unfair," said Assemblyman Richard Brodsky (D-Westchester), the plan's leading opponent in the Assembly. "In the end, the overwhelming majority of the Democratic conference made the decision here. Probably 80 percent opposed the legislation."

Despite the onslaught of editorial boards blaming Silver for the plan's failure, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno had an equal chance at passing the bill. Silver stepped forward and said he wasn’t bringing the pricing bill to the Assembly floor because the overwhelming majority of Assembly Democrats opposed it during a protracted, closed-door, conference. Bruno, on the other hand, never said what the position of the majority of his GOP conference was, particularly the many Republican senators representing commuter districts as far away as Rockland County.

Bruno appears to have flirted with the notion of a floor vote only to put Senate Democrats in the difficult position of voting for or against it, but no one in Albany believes he had the votes to pass the bill from his own conference. Silver and Bruno, like the legislative leaders that preceded them for decades, rarely, if ever, allow floor votes on a bill unless a majority of their own members favor it.

Three senators interviewed by the Voice indicated that Bruno was merely posturing on the bill, raising questions about the Bloomberg administration’s evenhandedness in their assessment of how the biggest reform effort of their second term was scuttled. The difference was that as the Monday night deadline got closer, it was Silver who finally spoke up about what was actually true in both houses: This bill didn’t have enough support to pass.

“The assembly, by not voting, gave Joe an out — he appears to have made a promise to the Mayor without actually believing he could deliver it,” said Senator Liz Krueger (D- Manhattan), who was in favor of the bill. “Joe didn’t think he had the votes in the senate, and once the assembly publicly announced that they weren’t bringing a vote, he didn’t have to try anymore. ... At least the assembly said they didn’t try to bring it to the floor.

Since introducing the plan on Earth Day last summer, Bloomberg has donated an estimated $1.2 million of his own money to the Senate Republican Committee and $50,000 to the Republican Assembly, but has not donated a dime to statewide committees for senate and assembly Democrats. In the final accounting, Bloomberg's actual contributions will probably be even greater than initially projected, according to Senator Krueger.

“They don’t have to report any new filings until July," Krueger said. “He could have given them anything they wanted — we have no idea what he gave them in total. I suspect that the adding up of the amounts will be much more than reported so far."

Polar divisions between upstate Republicans — with access to Bloomberg's campaign contributions — and metro-area Republicans — whose constituents didn't want to pay $8 every time they drove into Manhattan — would have left the deciding votes in the hands of the Democrats. Had the Dems rejected congestion pricing, the city’s pro-pricing and pro-Bloomberg media certainly would have taken notice again and again before the fall election season.

According to Long Island Senator Craig Johnson (D-Port Washington), who opposed the bill, there was never strong support from his GOP counterparts in the Senate, primarily out of fear that Long Island would turn into a giant parking lot. As to why upstate Republicans would have any interest in going against the wishes of their city brethren, Johnson could only guess: "Obviously there were stories about how the mayor donated half a million dollars to the senate campaigns, so that might have had something to do with it," he said. "I just think it's rather a shame that we didn't get a chance to hear from them."

Krueger said that communities outside of the metro area, who wouldn't be nearly as affected by the bill, don't necessarily need to have that much of a say in the matter. "If you’re north of commuting distance from New York City, you don’t have a horse in this race,” Krueger said. Still, even if there had been a vote, Krueger said, there was enough vocal opposition from metro-area Republican senators to make Bruno question whether he could do his part in getting Bloomberg's bill passed.

"I’m up there, and I never heard any Senate Republican saying they would support this bill," Krueger said. "There were plenty of Long Island, Staten Island, and Westchester Senators who had no intention of voting for it. Joe Bruno would have needed a lot of Republican Senators to vote for this for it to pass, and he never implied he had those votes. He never brought it to the floor."

But according to Senate spokesman Mark Hansen, Bruno "has a very good relationship with mayor Bloomberg," "is supportive of the plan for congestion pricing" and would have brought the bill to the floor for a vote last Monday, when the assembly passed on taking it up, had enough senators been present. As many as 17 Democrats boycotted the session that day, according to press reports.

Senator Johnson said the idea that Bruno wanted a vote but was let down by a boycott by the Democrats is a fiction. “He had enough members in the Senate chamber to bring this to the floor," Johnson said. "At one point, there were 34 members of the Senate on the floor, and by the end of the day Monday there were 45. He could’ve brought it to a vote at any point, but he chose not to, and the reason is that he knew he didn’t have enough votes to pass it.”

Krueger said that Senate Democrats were primarily concerned with budget disputes that day, and that Bruno never actually called the Rules Committee or the Finance Committee into session about congestion pricing; a necessary step before bringing any bill to the floor.

Senator Carl Marcellino (R-Syosset), one of several Long Island Republicans opposed to the bill, said his impression was that the Senate was never planning to consider congestion pricing that day, an omission that could only be attributable to Bruno, who sets the Senate calendar.

"To my knowledge, it was not meant to be brought to the table that day,” Marcellino said. “It was never on the schedule."

It's OK To Say Bruno and IRS in Same Breath: Spitzer Flack

Posted by Michael Clancy at 4:28 PM, October 11, 2007

Wayne Barrett's "The Truth Behind Troopergate" first raised the question as to whether state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno needs to report his taxpayer-funded personal travel to the IRS as income. Then the Bruno camp went ballistic when Senate Democrats drafted a letter to the IRS about the Senate Majority Leader's travel. Now Spitzer's Press Secretary Christine Anderson says what's wrong with asking the IRS to investigate whether there was some impropriety:

Recent newspaper articles suggest that for many years Senator Bruno has been using state vehicles for trips that included personal political business. Media outlets have raised questions about the tax implications of those trips, because personal use of state airplanes, helicopters and cars is considered a fringe benefit that must be reported as imputed income,* and Senator Bruno's aide indicates that Senator Bruno has never paid taxes for these trips.

Executive Chamber staff and Senate staff appropriately discussed whether these alleged tax violations should be formally referred to the relevant authorities. Senator Bruno is simply trying to divert attention by claiming that it was somehow improper for government employees to consider asking enforcement agencies to look into this matter. It is not. To the contrary, it is appropriate for relevant authorities to determine whether it warrants investigation.

Joe Bruno and the IRS

Posted by Michael Clancy at 1:34 PM, October 11, 2007

Call it Troopergate, Choppergate, or the The Dirty Tricks scandal, as the New York Post has taken to calling it lately, but no matter what the name, state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno's questionable use of state aircraft is a story that might stick around longer than Gov. Spitzer's ham-handed investigation of it.

The Post reported on Thursday that Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith of Queens, an ally of Governor Spitzer, somehow leaked a draft letter to the IRS regarding the Senate leader's travel, being circulated among Democrats, to the Bruno camp. Bruno aides then used one of their typical judo maneuvers, saying the letter shows that the governor and his surrogates are still up to more tricks.

On the Daily Politics blog, the Daily News Elizabeth Benjamin reports that this latest round of fighting was probably sparked by Wayne Barrett's "The Truth Behind Troopergate."

As Smith noted his statement:

"Clearly, recent published reports have said that Senator Bruno could have a tax problem with the IRS. If the facts show there is something there, it should be looked into by the appropriate authorities. There were communications between my staff and the governor's staff about this matter. I want to be clear. We - my staff and I - decided not to pursue this matter after concluding it would be a distraction from us getting back to the people's business."

Barrett wrote:

But Cuomo clearly does have subpoena power in any tax investigation—yet he chose, curiously, to ignore that inviting investigative trail. For even if Bruno's use of the aircraft met the state's minimal regulatory standards, as Cuomo concluded, it might well have been inconsistent with IRS requirements.

State travel guidelines say that a trip has to include at least one meeting involving a governmental purpose. But as Mario Cuomo's press secretary explained when news stories appeared about his flights, a 1985 IRS ruling "required that Cuomo and his family pay taxes on the value of trips that weren't made primarily for state business." (Emphasis added.) From 1985 through 1989, for example, the Cuomos were taxed on $22,686 worth of personal travel paid for by taxpayers under the provisions for "imputed income." In 1993, Mario Cuomo reported $5,660 in private trips on state aircraft and paid a third of that in taxes. But Bruno press secretary McArdle told the Voice flatly: "No, the senator didn't pay taxes." McArdle also used precisely the same word as Mario Cuomo's press secretary did an eon ago, insisting that the trips were " primarily for legislative business." But Andrew Cuomo's report rebuts any claim that Bruno's trips were first and foremost for legislative reasons. "On several occasions," Cuomo found, based only on an examination of this handful of Bruno excursions, "the legislative business constituted a minor portion of the day's schedule."

Had Cuomo simply applied the same tax standard that was used for the flights his father had made, he could have gained subpoena power for the probe, and perhaps identified illegal (if not criminal) actions by Bruno.

The Daily News Bill Hammond suggests "Bruno should have hired an accountant to figure out what he owes in back taxes - before the IRS picks up a copy of the Voice.

Remembering Roger Stone Fondly

Posted by Michael Clancy at 1:38 PM, August 22, 2007

The pendulum swings the other way? Roger Stone, and wife, Nydia

One more strange twist in the Gov. Eliot Spitzer TrooperGate Scandal and it may be approaching R. Kelly's Trapped in The Closet series in terms of weird.

In this latest chapter, someone—was it the midget under the sink?—left a menacing, profanity-laced phone message for the governor's father, Bernard Spitzer, who at age 83 is suffering from the early stages of Parkinson's disease.

According to the New York Times:, which has an mp3 of the message here, the caller says the elder Spitzer will be subpoenaed before Senate Committee on Investigations to testify about loans he made to his son to finance his earlier campaigns:

“If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany...There is not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son’s a pathological liar will be known to all."

Private investigators for Spitzer, the elder, traced the calls to an apartment at 40 Central Park South, which is owned by Roger Stone, the political operative who's been doing Republican dirtywork since the Nixon administration.

Village Voice readers may remember the Republican operative from Wayne Barrett's reporting on Stone's secret role in Al Sharpton's Presidential Campaign in 2004 or how Stone exploited his Bush administration contacts to make millions in the Indian gaming industry after he fomented the "'Brooks Brothers mob' that shut down the Miami-Dade recount in 2000."

Naturally, Stone—who lost a $20,000-a-month consulting gig for the state Republican Party this morning— denied having a role in the call, saying it was part of an elaborate conspiracy. C'mon, Roger, say it was the midget.

Eliot Spitzer: Willie Stark or Mr. Smith Goes to Albany?

Posted by Michael Clancy at 1:58 PM, July 30, 2007

By Harry Bruinius

“Bust 'em and they'll stay busted,” said Governor Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “All the Kings Men.” “But buy ‘em and you can't tell how long they'll stay bought.”

It’s been seven months into the administration of Governor Eliot Spitzer, the fiercely gawky, blue-eyed pol from the Bronx who swept into power this year with a mandate as sweeping as the Empire State as ever seen.

But in the past week, in a quintessentially American saga of power, hubris, and vaunting ambition, the erstwhile “sheriff of Wall Street,” the populist scourge who seemed to single-handedly denude the unctuous titans of finance through the humble office of a states attorney, has squandered that mandate with the same kind of power-wielding chutzpah he once made headlines bringing low.

And while Spitzer’s media-savvy and hard-nose deal-making forced his Wall Street antagonists to forgo a fight and settle, he had still been able to create an image more Mr. Smith goes to Albany than the bust-‘em Willie Stark—he was the tough and savvy idealist who could outwit the smartest guys in the room by exposing their sneaky accounting and unscrupulous leveraging of power.

But now the governor faces the same kind of humiliating scrutiny. The State Ethics Commission and the Senate are leafing through the attorney general’s report, promising to keep for weeks Spitzer’s clumsy attempt to bust Senate Leader Joseph Bruno. Not only did the governor’s office cross an ethical line by using the State Police to dig up dirt on its most powerful political opponent, the report stated, it also concocted a phony reason for doing so.

In the cynical game of politics, a public leader’s rhetoric and actions seldom closely match. But Governor Spitzer had made ethics his thing.

His crusades against Wall Street hardly seemed sanctimonious in an era of Enron and ImClone, and his settlements seemed judicious and fair, with an eye toward changing a ethically laissez faire culture rather than meting out punitive justice. His headlines were not just hype, and his sweeping victory last year really seem to promise, as he proclaimed, that “day one, everything changes.”

“Some public officials may not want to face stricter ethics rules and more competitive elections, but all citizens will win when we finally get a government that puts the people’s interests, openness and integrity first,” he also said at his inauguration. “Every policy, every action every decision we make in this administration will further two overarching objectives: we must transform our government so that it is as ethical and wise as all of New York, and we must rebuild our economy so that it is ready to compete on the global stage in the next century.”

Given his political capital, and given his adversarial instincts as an attorney general (his only elected office before becoming governor), perhaps it was inevitable that he would overreach and be seduced by power. Instead of becoming ethical and wise, he hoped to denude; instead of openness and integrity, it appears, he resorted to the most clichéd of dirty tricks.

But beyond the hypocrisy, the humiliation, and of course the gleeful schadenfreude echoing through Wall Street last week, Governor Spitzer has sparked life into the moribund New York Republican Party. Elected to none of the state’s four major posts, including lieutenant governor, comptroller, and attorney general, their Senate Leader Bruno already being investigated by the feds, the GOP appeared relegated to being a procedural pain-in-the-ass rather than setting any of the agenda. Indeed, Spitzer’s state campaign-finance overhaul may now become engulfed in endless questions about what he knew of Troopergate and when he knew it.

Many have mentioned the jug-eared New York governor as a future presidential candidate, and, indeed, politicians often have many lives, even after scandals much more grave than this. But this is how politics has always been, from day one.