State Officials Hide What Those in City Must Disclose

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The New York Sun

As the city’s top lawmakers prepare to disclose their personal finances tomorrow, calls are mounting for the same disclosure requirements — at the very least — to be placed on holders of statewide office.

Unlike city officials, who each year give New Yorkers insight into the amount of money they earn from outside jobs or have placed in investments, state officials have managed to find a way to ensure that their annual financial disclosure statements contain virtually no financial information whatsoever.

The system is bewildering, even to those lawmakers who are in charge of it. When The New York Sun asked a co-chairman of the Legislative Ethics Commission, Assemblyman William Magnarelli, why public financial disclosure reports do not contain information about state lawmakers’ outside income and investments, he said he was surprised to learn that the data are redacted.

“Then, what good is it?” he said.

Political observers and advocacy groups have long been asking the same question, and they are pressing state officials to overhaul the system so that lawmakers would be required to comply with more stringent ethics rules and disclose financial information to the public, where it could be scrutinized for potential conflicts of interest.

“The situation regarding legislative ethical oversight in the state is farcical, scandalous,” the executive director of Common Cause New York, Susan Lerner, said. “It seems to be set up to ensure that nobody does anything about ethical issues.”

While city officials provide financial information each year to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board, an independent city agency whose members are appointed by the mayor and approved by the City Council, state lawmakers turn over financial information to their colleagues from the Senate and Assembly who sit on the ethics commission.

When filling out their annual financial disclosure paperwork, state legislators are asked to list their holdings and the income they have earned during the year, and to state the value of items based on a range of money scaled between Category A and Category F. Category A is for items valued atless than $5,000; Category F is for items valued atmore than $250,000.

When the forms are given to the public, the financial figures are redacted.

Removing the values means that voters don’t have any idea how much Speaker Sheldon Silver, for example, earned from his outside legal work in 2007, except that the Assembly leader collected at least $1,000 in fees last year. The state financial forms require only that lawmakers disclose income and holdings greater than $1,000.

The legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group, Blair Horner, called it “disclosure without disclosure.”

As a result of the different standard in the city, New Yorkers know that Council Member Lewis Fidler of Brooklyn earned up to $345,000 for legal work in 2006, and Council Member David Weprin of Queens pulled in up to $250,000 as an investment banker.

Last year’s documents also disclosed that Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum had assets worth between $699,000 and $2.4 million, and that Comptroller William Thompson Jr. had amassed an American Express credit card debt of between $5,000 and $35,000.

The city’s Conflicts of Interest Board tomorrow is releasing the financial disclosure forms for Mayor Bloomberg, Speaker Christine Quinn, Mr. Thompson, and Ms. Gotbaum. Reports for all other city officials will be released September 29.

A council member of Brooklyn who is running for a state Senate seat, Simcha Felder, said the discrepancy between the ethics rules for state and city lawmakers is unacceptable.

“It’s imperative that the state adopt the stricter disclosure and transparent rules that the city has, and it’s time for all elected officials in the state to be forthcoming,” he said.

Mr. Magnarelli indicated that the questions surrounding the practice of redacting financial information from the state’s financial disclosure forms might not go entirely unanswered.

“I think we should look at that again,” he said. He indicated, however, that sweeping changes were unlikely to come soon, as he spoke of the need to strike a balance between the public interest and privacy of lawmakers. He said he didn’t want required disclosures to dissuade people who would be “good public servants” from seeking office.

“I think we should make things a little bit more transparent than we do, but, on the other hand, I think people have a right to their privacy,” Mr. Magnarelli said. “Just making things public, period, all of the time becomes somewhat problematic when you are trying to get good people into government.”


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