For over a decade, New York Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie has been spending Democratic campaign funds on sporting events. A new report by Sam Mellins in New York Focus raises questions about how the money is being used. Sam Mellins spoke with WAMC’s Lucas Willard and Sam Dingman on Northeast Notebook.
Dingman: So Sam, your piece opens on this trip that Speaker Heastie and his team took in March to a Boston Celtics game. Tell us why this trip caught your attention...
Mellins: Ok well first of all, what is a native New Yorker doing at a Boston Celtics game in the year when the Knicks won the championship for the first time in two generations? Number one. But in a political sense, campaign finance records show that the tickets, the box suite, that Heastie and several of his staff members who were there enjoyed was a donation from the major New York-based hospitality company Delaware North. It was worth almost $14,000. So, as a reporter, any time I see a company giving a valuable gift that is enjoyed by a politician, my alarm bells start ringing right away, and I want to know everything about what's going on in that situation.
Willard: This was not, as you report, the first time Delaware North has made donations to the Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee – which Speaker Heastie helps manage. And you also found numerous instances where the DACC spent a lot of money on Yankees tickets – tell us about those.
Mellins: Yeah. So the political committee we're talking about here is The Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee, which, its goal is to elect Democrats to the State Assembly, and as Assembly Speaker, Carl Heastie is the honorary chair of that committee. So, you know, influential. And what we found - that since he became speaker and honorary chair in 2015, the committee has spent over a million dollars on Yankees tickets, Mets tickets, Knicks tickets, Rangers tickets. It got the Celtics tickets as gifts, and so yeah, this just sort of raises a lot of questions about a political committee spending a seven-figure sum on its you know its head and people associated with it going to sports games, and it's all in public data. And so once I realized that that was happening, I knew I really had to dig in. And we're talking about lots... as far as I know, it's all box seats, suites. You know, really prime tickets, and this includes Knicks playoff games, Subway Series, you know, Yankees and Mets games always a hot ticket, so these are… we're not talking about nosebleeds here. We're talking about some pretty lux experiences.
Dingman: So, to be clear Sam: technically there's nothing wrong with the DACC spending money on events, as long as they're fundraisers. But your piece raises questions about the true purpose of these events – tell us what you found in your reporting that raised those questions for you...
Mellins: So that's right. The legal benchmark is there has to be a political purpose for these expenditures, and that would in most cases, the claim is that the purpose was fundraising. There are conceivable other political purposes. If you… I don't know if you're having meetings at these games. I mean, you could also do it in a conference room, but whatever you know. But what is definitely not allowed is using these tickets for personal benefit. You know, if I just want to see a game of my favorite team, right? You know, Heastie is a Celtics fan. If he just wants to see a Celtics game, that's personal benefit. That's not allowed. So I talked to one former DAC staffer of this political committee who was at a bunch of these games, and he said, "Yeah, maybe some donors were there. There were also a lot of DAC staff there who had their travel costs covered. There were other elected officials there. It didn't really seem like a donor-focused event, so I think there's a lot of questions there. Some of these expenditures were coded as fundraising expenses in the financial disclosures, but some of them were not. There was about $150,000 of spending on you know Yankees, Mets, whatever that was coded as office expenses. So that I thought was rather mysterious, and I would love to uncover more information about what's going on there.
Willard: Going back to the Delaware North example, the state's most recent budget included a provision that could save Delaware North a lot of money. Can you explain how that might relate to your story?
Mellins: Yeah. So, just very briefly, Delaware North, a major hospitality company based in Buffalo, thousands of employees. They run stadium concessions. They run airport, you know, dining options. They run gambling venues, horse racing, all these kinds of things. And they're major lobbyists in Albany and in state politics. They lobby Heastie pretty regularly, as well as other lawmakers. And at the time that they donated this suite in at the Celtics game that Heastie and his staff used this year, they were also lobbying him related to a gambling facility that they operate in The Finger Lakes that has slot machines.
They were lobbying to get the tax rate of those slot machines reduced, and they were successful. I mean, there were other gambling companies as well that were lobbying on this, but they were the only one that lobbied Heastie personally. And there was a provision in this year's state budget, which was passed in spring, reducing the tax rate on slot machines. Not only for Delaware North, also other gambling companies will benefit from it. But according to our analysis, Delaware North could benefit to the tune of $18 million from this change. So, they're giving him this lux gift at the same time as they're lobbying him on a provision that they stand to gain millions of dollars from, and that sort of nexus really caught our attention as we were reporting the story.
Dingman: As you report, since Heastie became speaker in 2015 and started managing the DACC funds, about a million dollars have gone to sports expenditures. Did Speaker Heastie have anything to say about this reporting when you brought it to his attention?
Mellins: We reached out multiple times for comment to his office, to the political committee, to his spokesperson. We did not hear anything before we published the story. After we published the story, he did an Instagram post about it, which you know you can read it yourself if you want to check out his Instagram. But one sentence summary: He said, “It's called fundraising stupid.” So that's the answer he's going with.
Dingman: Well, sort of Constantino-esque to go back to the conversation we were just having.
Mellins: Well, no profanity. So, you know, he's keeping it a little more polite.
