Assembly Has Not Included Ethics Reform

On Tuesday of this week, we saw the release of the Assembly’s and Senate’s one-house budget resolutions. These resolutions show the policy priorities of each chamber before entering the closed door budget negotiations between the leaders from each chamber and the governor.
The Assembly’s $150.7 billion budget resolution does not include the ethics reform that was presented by Governor Cuomo through his 30-day budget amendments. Speaker Carl Heastie said “We haven’t come to a final position on ethics,”. The Speaker has long spoke out against the manner in which the ethics reform was tied to the budget. Speaker heastie sees “It kind of ties the Legislature’s hands.” Cuomo’s administration validated the use of the ethics amendments to the budget because the legislature has long avoided real ethics reform. The Speaker is not against ethics reform but has stated his discontent with the ethics reform only applying to the legislature and the way it was embedded into the budget.



Speaker Heastie would be more willing to negotiate the ethics reform if it was also applied to the executive. The Speaker keeps reminding the public of the $700,000 book deal that the Governor could receive for his memoir. Interestingly, Heastie did comment saying “There are certain things under the legislative guise should be protected and I do believe in that.” In a news conference outlining the Assembly’s one-house budget resolution the Speaker was“cagey”  and “subdued’ about the details of ethics reform.
 There was some mention of ethics reform in the Assembly’s resolution but the Speaker didn’t go into detail. As the resolution stands there would be the cutting back of contributions from limited liability corporations, restricting the use of campaign funds for personal use but no disclosure of outside income.