Editorial

So much for sunlight

Posted

‘People all across the state, when you mention state government, [are] literally shaking their heads. Worse than no confidence; what they’re saying is, no trust. The words ‘government in Albany’ have become a national punch line. And the joke is on us. Too often, government responds to the whispers of the lobbyists before the cries of the people. Our people feel abandoned by government, betrayed and isolated, and they are right.”

Those were the words of the new governor, Andrew Cuomo, on Jan. 1, 2011.

Later in that inaugural speech, he said: “Any relationship is only as good as the level of trust, and we have lost the trust. And we are not going to get it back until we clean up Albany, and there’s real transparency and real disclosure and real accountability and real ethics and real ethics enforcement. That’s what the people have voted for; that’s what the people deserve.”

Yet far from making Albany more trustworthy, it seems the governor is doing all he can to widen the divide between the civics lessons he articulates for public consumption and the actions he takes that turn citizens into cynics.

Cuomo speaks often of sunlight, more transparency, more candor when it comes to doing the business of government. But last week his executive budget proposal contained a change that would accomplish the opposite.

It would eliminate the requirement that proposed amendments to the state constitution be published as legal notices in newspapers. Instead of the current system, in which the exact words of all proposed constitutional amendments must be placed as legal notices in one paper in every county in the state, the state Board of Elections would simply upload a summary of the amendment to its own website. Interested citizens who somehow find out that someone is proposing an amendment to the state’s constitution can search for a summary of it — not the exact words, mind you, but a favorable summary of it — somewhere on the state elections board website.

How’s that for openness and accountability? How’s that for doing the business of the state in glorious sunshine?

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