This newsletter provides a breakdown of this year’s January – June 2105 legislative session. Unfortunately, the few legislative accomplishments of the session were completely overshadowed by the indictments of the legislative majority leaders of both the Senate and the Assembly. One would hope that these revelations of corruption would have helped build support for meaningful ethics and campaign finance reforms, but instead, this being Albany, they were used by the Governor and the new leaders as an excuse for inaction on many of the key issues facing our state.
I do think the attention to corruption in Albany will help in the long-term, and I hope that U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara will continue his work; perhaps it will eventually spark the necessary fundamental changes in the way Albany does business. But in the short-term, too little has changed.
What follows is a summary of the major issues that faced Albany this year, and what the outcomes were on those issues. Unfortunately most of this newsletter is devoted to what didn’t get done since this was one of the least productive sessions I have seen in Albany in a long time. A few reports have actually said that since we eventually passed a large number of bills it was a successful session. I prefer to measure QUALITY over quantity. You?
The newsletter can be downloaded as a PDF file here, and is viewable below.
