A 2011 state ethics law is shedding light on who funds lobbying in Albany—including efforts by a number of prominent business groups to influence legislation.
The state’s Joint Committee on Public Ethics has posted online the first batch of disclosure forms submitted by state lobbying groups, which reveal who funded their lobbying efforts from July through December 2012. The 54 disclosures include the Business Council of New York State and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, as well as the good-government group Common Cause and unions such as the Public Employees Federation.
The Business Council’s contributor list shows a slew of relatively small-dollar donors funding its lobbying efforts, with the biggest donations coming from IBM ($38,000), Citibank ($25,600), Con Ed ($25,000) and Wegmans ($20,000). There were also some non-business donors to the Business Council, such as SUNY Albany and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which in September gave $1,325. The Brooklyn Chamber’s filing, meanwhile, showed about $4,000 in total donations.
One notable non-filing was that of the Committee to Save New York, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s agenda. As the Associated Press reported a week ago, the Committee is reporting no new contributions over the past six months and may have suspended its activities because of the new requirement that contributors be revealed.
Controversially, JCOPE, which includes six Cuomo appointees out of 14 commissioners, decided last August not to require disclosure of lobbying groups’ donations prior to July 2012. That means the donors who financed the Committee to Save New York’s huge spending on behalf of Mr. Cuomo’s agenda during his first two legislative sessions are not publicly known.
A pro-casino lobbying group, the New York Gaming Association, has acknowledged giving $2 million to the Committee to Save New York in 2011 as Mr. Cuomo ramped up efforts to implement full-scale gaming in New York. And that group did file a form with JCOPE disclosing its donations for all of 2012, which shows big money coming in from expected players. It reveals $290,000 from Genting (more than $172,000 of which came in March, during a failed effort to build a convention center and perhaps introduce human dealers at the company’s Resorts World Casino in southeast Queens) and donations in the tens-of-thousands from the nine racinos around the state. The Legislature is wrestling this session with where to locate up to seven casinos ahead of an expected November referendum on a constitutional amendment allowing them in New York.
