Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo said Thursday that his office would review thousands of individual grants known as "member items," the spending Albany lawmakers doled out for pet projects last year, staking out a potentially vast new front in efforts to reform the ways of the state capital.
And moving to confront corruption in the upper echelons of state government, Mr. Cuomo also said he would promote the chief of his office's public integrity unit to special deputy attorney general, and promised a significant increase in the unit's staffing and resources.
In a brief but pointed speech here Thursday at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, Mr. Cuomo assailed the member-item spending as "a visible, graphic illustration" of the profligacy, secrecy and dysfunction that have characterized state government and dismayed voters in recent years.
Last month, federal prosecutors accused State Senator Efrain González Jr., a Bronx Democrat, of stealing more than $400,000 in state money appropriated for charities in his district and using it for personal expenses. Joseph L. Bruno, the Republican majority leader of the State Senate, is facing a federal investigation into some $500,000 in state grants he directed to Evident Technologies, a profit-making technology company in which a close friend of his was an investor.
