YeHaw! I hope heads roll. In order to make any headway in Albany you have to focus on the leadership, Bruno and Silver.. Only time will tell, this will be fun to watch.

War on pork — Page 1 — Times Union - Albany NY

State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo brings unprecedented scrutiny to member items

First published: Saturday, January 6, 2007

How different is Albany suddenly, with Eliot Spitzer as the new governor, Andrew Cuomo as his successor as attorney general and a legislative culture under siege? It takes nothing more than the status of $200 million in what are known as member items to gauge the pace of potentially radical change in state government.

Mr. Cuomo is right to cite them, in his words, as “probably the most visible, graphic symbol of the degradation” that must be repaired. A year ago, the full list of projects sponsored by individual legislators as well as the governor’s office wasn’t even public. Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno made the quest for disclosure something of a dare. It took a lawsuit by this newspaper to get Mr. Bruno and the other holdout, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, to come clean.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia has obtained an indictment of Sen. Efrain Gonzalez, D-Bronx, on charges of stealing his share of that money. And now comes Mr. Cuomo, vowing to enforce a legal standard that goes well beyond absence of criminal wrongdoing.

This money, the attorney general says, must be spent in a way that meets the constitutionally required legitimate public purpose. So goes one more warning to the Legislature that it must go about its business in a decidedly different way. Just listen to the critics of state government, in this case E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center for New York State Policy, wanting to know the public purpose of spending $50,000 of the state’s money to fix the roof of the Brunswick Sportsman’s Club. Yes, that’s an actual member item, right there in Mr. Bruno’s hometown.

The attorney general’s office is about to begin a review of 6,000 member items from the 2006-2007 budget year. In the future, member items will require a contract with a state agency. Those contracts will be subject to auditing, too. They can be canceled, and the money returned to the state, if all is not on the up and up.

Other places, this would be a routine matter of fiscal responsibility and common sense. In Albany, though, it’s another front in a welcome war on the status quo.

The leaders of the Legislature say they welcome Mr. Cuomo’s foray. But, really, how can they oppose it, at least publicly?

In Mr. Silver’s case, the standard excuse is truly obsolete. He used to defend putting member items into a lump sum, making accountability impossible, after then-Gov. George Pataki vetoed many projects sponsored by Democrats in the 1999 state budget.

Only now it’s 2007, with a new administration trying to govern accordingly. That doesn’t mean, or shouldn’t mean, a way of exacting political retribution, as a spokesman for the former governor fears might be the case. It’s instead a matter of, as Mr. Cuomo put it, trying “to put some meat on the bones of what we mean by reform.”

New Yorkers should relish an oversized helping.