Cuomo and Legislators Strike Deal on New Ethics Rules

In the wake of scandals that have felled two New York governors and multiple state lawmakers, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and leaders of the Legislature announced an agreement on Friday to overhaul the state’s ethics laws as part of an effort to stem corruption and misconduct in Albany.

The agreement would force legislators, many of whom have part-time law practices, to disclose the names of clients who have business before the state; would allow prosecutors to seek to strip pensions from future elected officials convicted of felonies; and would for the first time allow officials appointed by a governor a role in overseeing legislative compliance with ethics laws.

“Government does not work without the trust of the people,” Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, said in a statement. “And this ethics overhaul is an important step in restoring that trust.”

The agreement followed months of tortuous negotiations conducted in secret. The governor, who has made overhauling ethics rules a priority, tried to pressure the Legislature by traveling the state with a PowerPoint presentation listing the names of lawmakers charged with corruption; two continue to serve and will be eligible to vote on ethics changes even while awaiting trial.

Mr. Cuomo had repeatedly warned that if the Legislature did not agree to revise ethics rules, he would use a century-old law known as the Moreland Act to appoint an investigative commission charged with ferreting out legislative abuses.

Government watchdog groups were guardedly optimistic about the ethics overhaul after being allowed to inspect a draft agreement.

“It’s novel and untested, but promises to be a success because of its different approach,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union. “For there now to be external oversight of the State Legislature by a separate body is significant.”

The agreement is to be announced on Monday in Albany, but the governor and legislative leaders issued a joint statement on Friday describing the details. If approved by the Legislature, the agreement would be the second major overhaul of the state’s ethics enforcement apparatus in the last four years, and would create a joint ethics commission with oversight over both the executive and legislative branches.

“Time will tell,” said Lawrence Norden, senior counsel to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. “There are no guarantees. But it is better than what we have now.”

The commission would include six people appointed by a governor, split between Democrats and Republicans. In addition, the majority leaders of both legislative houses would make three appointments each, and the minority leaders would each make one.

In a concession to Republican concerns that Democrats would use the commission for partisan purposes, the structure of the new commission gives de facto veto power to the appointees of the Assembly speaker and the Senate majority leader to block investigations of sitting lawmakers. And if the commission voted against pursuing a complaint, that decision would remain secret — as would any vote to block a public finding of wrongdoing after an investigation.

To help insulate appointees from political influence, board members will serve five-year terms. No member may be a lawmaker, senior state official or lobbyist.

In addition to requiring lawmakers to disclose their own clients, the state will create a public database of people or firms who represent private interests before state agencies. The new disclosure is intended to allow closer public scrutiny of firms that employ lawmakers, even in cases where the lawmakers do not personally represent clients before state agencies.

The State Senate leader, Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican, and the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, are paid for part-time work at large law firms; both men say they do not personally represent any clients with business before the state, but partners at Mr. Skelos’s firm do represent such clients.

The deal gives Mr. Cuomo another victory, on top of his successful budget negotiation and his brokering of a pact to cap property taxes. But it does not accomplish another of his goals: to improve the state’s campaign finance laws, widely criticized by government watchdog groups as outdated, weakly enforced and overly permeable.

The last round of ethics improvements was won in 2007 by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, who persuaded the Legislature to enact a ban on gifts to public officials and new limits on lobbying for former public officials.

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City Report Finds No Work Slowdown in Blizzard Cleanup

The councilman, Daniel J. Halloran, became something of a national news celebrity for a more than week. Commentators said his evidence showed how public employee unions were harming America.

But on Friday, a report by the city’s Department of Investigation said that investigators, after interviewing more than 150 witnesses and reviewing video from surveillance cameras and from angry residents, had found no evidence of an organized slowdown. In fact, the report found, Mr. Halloran had no evidence for his accusation, and his account of conversations with two workers differed sharply from what the workers told investigators.

“In toto,” the report said, “Mr. Halloran’s information about city employee statements contributed no actual evidence about a possible slowdown.”

The report did find fault with elements of the city’s response to the Dec. 26 snowstorm, which left 20 inches of snow in Central Park and paralyzed the city for days. A half-dozen trucks, among hundreds reviewed, were inexplicably idle, or moving through snowbound streets with their plows raised for no apparent reason. Some workers remained with stuck vehicles for as long as 12 hours, investigators found. About 44 percent of the snow chains on trucks broke during the cleanup.

And a few workers were photographed buying beer or coffee when they were supposed to be cleaning the streets. The investigators said those workers were doing so only while stuck with broken-down equipment, and not as part of a labor slowdown, but the workers caught drinking now face disciplinary charges.

The city also made choices that might have slowed the cleanup. A decision to stop salting roads as the snowfall warnings increased was controversial within the Sanitation Department. And because the city elected not to declare a snow emergency, many drivers became stuck in roadways, and their cars impeded the cleanup.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who initially dismissed complaints about the storm response, said through a spokeswoman on Friday that many of the new report’s findings would be addressed “to ensure that snow removal operations function well in the future, as they have in many other storms.”

Harry Nespoli, the president of the sanitation workers union, said the report vindicated his members and supported what he had said in testimony to the City Council and in numerous news media interviews in the weeks after the storm.

“The report confirms my contention that the members of this union would never participate in an organized action that puts our city and its people at risk,” Mr. Nespoli said in a statement.

Mr. Halloran released a statement through his spokesman pointing out that while the investigation found no evidence of a slowdown, it did not “come to any definite conclusion” that one did not happen.

“I am proud that my constituents felt I would have the courage of my convictions to take on the city,” the statement said. “They expect me to stand up for them and be their voice and I am going to keep doing that.” Mr. Halloran had been quoted saying that workers had come to his office during the storm and told him they had been directed to take part in a slowdown to embarrass Mr. Bloomberg, who had proposed work force changes in the Sanitation Department.

Mr. Halloran has said he based his slowdown accusations, which first appeared in The New York Post, on conversations he had with two Transportation Department supervisors who had been assigned to the cleanup and with three Sanitation Department workers.

But he refused to give the names of the sanitation workers to investigators, citing attorney-client privilege. A footnote in the report notes that after Mr. Halloran raised attorney-client privilege as a basis to withhold information, a Department of Investigation lawyer informed him that city conflict-of-interest rules bar public servants from doing work that “is in conflict with the proper discharge of his or her official duties."

When city investigators spoke to the transportation supervisors, the two said they had no evidence of a slowdown.

One said he did not reach out to the councilman, as Mr. Halloran had said, but had been summoned to his office by a mutual friend. The supervisor, who was not named in the report, said he submitted to a brief “grilling” by Mr. Halloran, but told the councilman that he knew nothing about a slowdown other than the rumors he had heard in the news media.

The supervisor said Mr. Halloran appeared to be upset with that answer.

The other supervisor also said he knew nothing about a slowdown and was present only because he had happened to tag along with his colleague. He said Mr. Halloran appeared annoyed.

According to the report, one of the transportation supervisors told investigators that as they were leaving the meeting, Mr. Halloran said, “If you don’t want to talk, I will find a disgruntled worker who is ready to retire who is.”

In February, Mr. Halloran was called to testify before a grand jury investigating the supposed slowdown. No announcements have been made about whether its investigation has concluded. A spokesman for Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney in the Eastern District of New York, declined to comment.

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