After the New York state budget passed in April, state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins announced a push for ethics reform. Her colleague, Sen. Liz Krueger, was hoping that the central piece of the push would be first passage of a constitutional amendment that would rebuild the Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) from the ground up.

While that bill (S855/A1929) never passed the state Senate, a different bill, the Omnibus JCOPE Reform bill, sponsored by Sen. Alessandria Biaggi, did. Bill S.6964-A would make a variety of reforms to the ethics board, including removing the requirement that legislators, state employees, and statewide officials can be investigated or found guilty of ethical violations by JCOPE only with the votes of at least two members of their own political party.

In spite of the scandals surrounding Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and news that JCOPE staffers, not commissioners, had approved Cuomo’s multi-million dollar book deal, the state Assembly never took up the reform measure.

“The Assembly rank-and-file and a lot of the leadership do not have an appetite for ethics reform,” John Kaehny, executive director of ReInvent Albany, told Capital Tonight. 

When asked why, Kaehny said that the state Senate has an influx of new blood and “progressive members who are pretty much fed up with old ways and corrupt ways of doing things in Albany.”

“The Assembly is run by more traditional powers,” Kaehny said. “[Assembly Speaker] Carl Heastie comes out of the Bronx Democratic political clubhouse. And many of his allies are long-time entrenched incumbents.”

But when asked in May by Capital Tonight why the Assembly didn’t take up JCOPE reform when the Senate had, Speaker Heastie said the Senate never engaged the Assembly on the legislation.

“Number one, I can only assume the Senate passed a bill that was in the interest of what they felt needed to be improved in terms of JCOPE,” Heastie said. “But the Senate didn’t engage us on that bill, per se.  But I will say this in terms of the Assembly. We will always be open to making sure that New Yorkers feel that their government is functioning in an honest and open and transparent and efficient way.”

This summer, Senate Ethics Committee Chair Alessandra Biaggi plans to hold the first of two hearings on overhauling JCOPE.