Reform Day and Paterson Is Absent? A scheduling conflict? Please, what a lame excuse, he and all the legislators know about this day long before hand so they can be there. He apparently didn’t want to be there to face the very people that have worked tirelessly to try and get Albany reformed year after year.
Reform Day at Capitol, but Paterson Is Absent – New York Times
ALBANY — Shortly after Eliot Spitzer was elected governor on a platform of scrubbing state government clean, one of his first orders of business was to sit down with government watchdog groups. But the watchdogs are finding that the new governor, David A. Paterson, is a little harder to pin down.
Tuesday was Reform Day here, when self-described good-government groups converge on the Capitol to pitch causes like tougher campaign finance rules and more transparent public information laws.
A luncheon drew a respectable roster of politicians, including the attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, and the Senate minority leader, Malcolm A. Smith.
But notably absent was Governor Paterson, who had been invited. Citing a scheduling conflict, he instead issued a written statement reaffirming his commitment to reform and sent his senior advisers to meet with the state’s leading watchdog groups.
To some of those groups, Mr. Paterson’s absence from the luncheon only underscored their concerns that the new administration would not give their causes the same level of attention given by Mr. Spitzer’s.
His administration had an aggressive agenda, which included tighter campaign finance regulations and stricter ethics for lawmakers; but he also was criticized for sometimes not living up to those very standards.
“It’s very disappointing that he’s not here today,” Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, said of Mr. Paterson. “He has been a friend of reform. Now is not the time to change.”
Later in the afternoon, the advocates finally got their audience with the governor when he agreed to an impromptu question-and-answer session outside his office in the Capitol.
