I would have rather seen a special election to fill the position of State Comptroller. Worst part is that Silver will have the controlling voice… The Peoples voice has been lost in this whole scandal, the one voice that should be the controlling factor.

PoughkeepsieJournal.com - Hevesi ouster leaves voters in cold

The state comptroller situation has been tied up in a nice, neat bow. The only losers appear to be New York voters.

Alan Hevesi, the disgraced former comptroller who admitted just before Christmas he defrauded taxpayers, enters the new year with a rich state pension, a plea deal that will keep him out of prison and plenty of spare time.

Gov.-elect Eliot Spitzer had one giant ethical and ceremonial headache removed from his plate when Hevesi agreed to step aside to avoid a possible 11⁄3-4-year prison term. On Inauguration Day, would Mr. Reform Governor shake hands with someone who stole services valued at more than $200,000 from taxpayers? Now he doesn’t have to worry.

Albany County District Attorney David Soares, who, when first elected in 2005, said he would go after white-collar criminals no matter their party affiliation or political power, proved he is a man of his word.

State Assembly Democrats also gain the advantage of, in effect, picking Hevesi’s successor, potentially opening up an attractive new career path for one of their own members.

And the numerous candidates for the job don’t have to go out and convince millions of voters he or she would be the best person to be the next fiscal watchdog for the state. They have to convince only a majority of the 212 state lawmakers (136 of whom are Democrats).

The people left out are the electorate.

Less than two months ago, voters decided Hevesi should get another four years on the job giving him good grades for increasing the $145 billion public-employee retirement fund and being an aggressive auditor in his first term.

Hevesi won decisively even though voters knew about his charging taxpayers for someone to chauffeur and run errands for his wife for 31⁄2 years.
Voters probably deserve a mulligan on the pick.

Here’s why: Hevesi turned out to be an effective liar. He said over and over what he had done was essentially a bookkeeping mistake. He intended all along to pay the money back, he kept saying, but just hadn’t gotten around to it.

He didn’t change his story, admitting he had no intention to pay the money back, until he was under oath before a judge and staring at a potential prison term.
Hevesi’s Republican opponent in the fall campaign, J. Christopher Callaghan, a former Saratoga County treasurer, was not a well-known figure outside of his home area. Because it appeared he had no shot to win (until very late in the race), he couldn’t raise enough money to become better known.

And Callaghan also came across as passive and inexperienced in the one televised debate.

Still, the result of the situation is voters will be left with someone they didn’t pick as comptroller for virtually an entire four-year term.

Important watchdog

The independence of the comptroller has always been a strength of the New York state government, especially because in modern times voters have been smart enough to usually elect one of the opposite party of the governor.

Over the last four years, Hevesi stood fast against attempts by Gov. George Pataki to shrink taxpayers’ contributions to the state pension fund when the state was having trouble balancing its budget. Republican Comptroller Edward Regan did much the same thing in the late ’80s when then-Gov. Mario Cuomo, a Democrat, proposed something similar.

As a result, the pension fund by most measurements has enough money to meet future retirement obligations. In some states where there is no independently elected official in charge of the pension, the piggy bank has been raided.
And more recently Hevesi held up some contracts Pataki wanted to award on his way out the door — contracts that Hevesi decided weren’t fiscally sound.

Will whomever the Legislature picks for the job show similar independence? Maybe, but we already know the person will likely be a Democrat — Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who has de facto control over the pick, said as much last week. So there will be nobody of the opposite political party casting a potentially critical eye on the fiscal activities of the new Democratic Spitzer administration.
Voters will have to wait almost four years to render their verdict on the Legislature’s choice.