A national report finds that New York State’s ethics panel is among the worst in the nation. Reform groups say that’s not news to them, and have called for an overhaul of the commission.
The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit news organization, surveyed state ethics panels around the country and found that New York’s ranked near the bottom for independence and transparency.
The group gives New York’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics, or JCOPE, an “F” rating for its lack of oversight.
Alex Camarda with Reinvent Albany says his group and other reform organizations have been saying for years that JCOPE is fatally flawed. He says one inherent conflict is that the commissioners are appointed by the governor and the legislature, the very entities that they are supposed to regulate.
“It’s appointed by the very elected officials that it oversees,” said Camarda.
Camarda says another problem is that it takes only a few commissioners to block an investigation of an elected official or state employee.
“Instead of a majority vote, it has this very convoluted system where three members can actually block an investigation from being opened, if they disagree even while the commission has 14 members,” he said.
There have been numerous corruption scandals in state government in recent years. Several former leaders of the legislature and some of Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo’s associates, including his former closest aide, Joe Percoco, have been sentenced to prison terms.
None of those crimes were brought to light by JCOPE. They were instead the result of federal investigations.
This month’s meeting of JCOPE was scheduled to last four hours, but just twelve minutes of that time was open to the public. Much of it centered on renovations to the commission’s office space in Buffalo and New York City.
At the meeting, the executive director of the ethics panel, Seth Agata, submitted his resignation. He will take a job at a private law firm in Manhattan after the June commission meeting. The announcement was made by JCOPE Chair Michael Rozen, who said a search for a replacement will begin immediately.
Agata is the third director of the commission. Like all of his predecessors, he is a former aide to Governor Cuomo. Camarda says, at the very least, the ethics commission should appoint a new executive director who is independent of the people that they regulate.
Agata testified as a witness at Cuomo aide Percoco’s federal trial. But during Agata’s tenure at JCOPE, the commission resisted a lawsuit brought by Republicans to force JCOPE to investigate Percoco for possible violations of state laws. A judge eventually ordered a vote. JCOPE confirmed they had cast ballots in a private meeting, but declined to say whether any investigation is moving forward.
Reinvent Albany, along with other reform groups, including Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, say the only good way to fix JCOPE is to start over with a new ethics panel. They wrote a letter to Cuomo and the leaders of the legislature, asking for a complete overhaul of JCOPE, and the Legislative Ethics Commission, which oversees accusations of wrongdoing against Senators and Assemblymembers.
“What we would like to see, ideally, is a body that is established in the constitution, that not only handles ethics but also looks at campaign finance and other issues,” Camarda said. “And is appointed by an independent body, for example, the judiciary."
A spokesman for JCOPE, Walter McClure, had no comment about the Center for Public Integrity’s ratings, but he says that the commission is simply functioning under the rules setup by the governor and the Senate and Assembly. He says “it is up to the Executive and the Legislature to make decisions about the laws that govern what we do and how we do it.”
