| Many articles have been written about the dysfunctional nature of Albany. A book has even been written about the "three men in a room" ways of Albany.
Aside from the reports that the Brennan Center has conducted, I don't think you could find a better summary of Albany than this Buffalo News article in today's edition.
Albany is New York's capital of dysfunction
In his 18 years with the FBI, John Pikus has investigated terrorists, drug dealers, bank robbers, gangs, white-collar criminals and murderers.
Then he ran into the New York State Legislature.
Despite overseeing an office with 80 agents armed with subpoenas and a battery of sophisticated investigatory tools, Pikus sounds almost humbled by the experience he had trying to crack the secrecy that defines the state Capitol.
"The legislative process was almost Byzantine in how it operates," said Pikus, whose investigators spent three years working on the case that led to last week's indictments against former Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno. "We have very expert investigators working on this. Some have come in from other districts and were quite surprised at how difficult it was to discern what was going on in the legislative process."
...
In Albany, rule No. 1 is to control the flow of information. Lawmakers and the governor spend millions each year on publicity efforts - whether it's a personal photographer for Paterson or state-of-the-art TV broadcast facilities where legislative staff members ask puffy questions of lawmakers to beam back to local stations.
But want to get things unfiltered, say transcripts of legislative floor debates? You can look at the Senate Web site but only if you work for the Senate. On its public Web site, no such transcripts exist.
There is a lot more to the article than just the excerpts above. The piece covers a lot of ground (the flow of information, the leadership dominating the legislative process, ethics, etc.) and does a great job at summarizing the failure that is our state capital.
I do disagree with one aspect of the article though. If you read the piece, you will find a part of the article early on where the reporter ties Albany's dysfunction with things like high taxes, out of control state spending, rising state debt, business and job loss and the declining population in parts of upstate.
I don't think those are the right things to point out if you are going to make a case for Albany being dysfunctional. Sure, Albany's issues certainly don't help any of those problems mentioned above, but they hardly are the major cause for those problems. The bigger problem with the ways of Albany is that we are shut out of the process. Even the most concerned of citizens would have a hard time finding a piece of legislation on either the Assembly or Senate websites. Transparency is a foreign concept in Albany. There have been a few improvements, but a lot more can be done to make Albany truly transparent.
What it comes down to is leadership. When President Barack Obama officially took office, he announced that his administration would be more open and transparent than any in history. It was President Obama, as a leader, who stood up and said that it was time for more openness and transparency. That is what we need in Albany from the "three men in a room."
Whether we get to that point or not is up to the leaders. Hopefully the FBI and U.S. Attorney's office can get their attention. We need to be a democracy in New York. We can't have anymore of this closed system of government that shuts out everyone except those who rule each branch of government. |
