You don’t hear Andrew Cuomo talking very much these days about the urgent need for comprehensive ethics reform.
For one thing, the gov is busy tooling around the state in his new RV, promoting a $15 minimum wage and paid family leave.
Tossing government ethics into the mix “is not the most fluid transition,” Cuomo said this week.
So it’s the back-burner for ethics reform — about which Cuomo seemed so passionate after Sheldon Silver and Dean Skelos were convicted of corruption.
But he might also be keeping mum because of that minimum-wage tour itself — and the ethical questions it’s raising.
Like whether Cuomo is working for the public unions backing his drive — or the unions are working for Cuomo. Either way, it’s blurring ethical lines.
Running Cuomo’s tour is yet another “outside” lobbying giant, the Mario Cuomo Campaign for Economic Justice. It’s a group exactly like Bill de Blasio’s Campaign for One New York — or the Committee to Save New York, set up in 2011 as a pro-Cuomo lobbying giant.
Only Cuomo’s old group used business community funding against the public unions. Now it’s the unions — SEIU and its health-care and building-trade affiliates — funding and organizing Cuomo’s minimum-wage campaign, Capital New York reports.
Also kicking in are companies and groups that have business before the state.
Susan Lerner, whose Common Cause New York last week demanded a formal investigation of de Blasio’s slush fund, says this cozy arrangement is essentially “setting up a shadow government.”
Is it legal? Probably — since the likes of Silver and Skelos wrote so many of New York’s laws. Ethical? Highly debatable.
Consistent with a governor who has repeatedly called for full transparency and accountability? No way.