New York’s troubled ethics panel holds final meeting

By Chris Bragg | Times Union, Albany

Albany, N.Y. — After 11 tumultuous years, New York’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics conducted its final meeting on Tuesday.

On July 8, the commission will cease to exist. The Legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed in the budget passed in April to replace it with a new ethics and lobbying oversight body — the Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government.

JCOPE was created through an ethics reform agreement struck in 2011 principally by three former lawmakers: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos. Silver and Skelos were later convicted on federal corruption charges and forced from office. Last August, Cuomo resigned after a state attorney general’s report concluded he had sexually harassed or acted inappropriately with multiple women, and the Legislature was poised to impeach him.

In those instances and other scandals involving powerful lawmakers, JCOPE did not play a significant role in uncovering the wrongdoing. The commission was long dogged by accusations that its commissioners were too close to the lawmakers who appointed them. The panel’s 14 commissioners were appointed by top state lawmakers, with the governor appointing six. And complex voting rules established in the legislation that created the embattled ethics commission gave authority to a few of the commissioners to veto investigations into powerful officials leading the legislative and executive branches.

After Cuomo resigned, Gov. Kathy Hochul replaced five of Cuomo’s six appointees to the body. One of them was Commissioner Sharon Stern Gerstman, who was appointed in October.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Gerstman said that during her eight-month tenure, criticisms that JCOPE was ineffective or political had not been true, and she praised both the commissioners and staff.

“The media has been wrong, at least with respect to this commission, these commissioners, as we are currently constituted,” she said.

Commissioner Gary Lavine — who emerged in recent years as a critic of Cuomo and his appointees to the panel Z— praised the Hochul-appointed chair of the body, Jose Nieves, for moving the body forward in recent months.

Not everyone in attendance thought the praise was warranted. A strident critic of the commission, attorney David Grandeau, attended the meeting and brought along a mask bearing the word “JJOKE,” a derisive term he coined during years of blogging about the panel. Grandeau’s work on behalf of a lobbying client is being investigated by the commission.

The commissioners voted to adopt a transparency initiative and to publicly release a letter they are sending to the state inspector general’s office.

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