July 16, 2006
With Arrests of Legislators, Hard Questions About Power, Perks and Temptations
By SAM ROBERTS, NY TIMES

The arrest last week of Assemblywoman Diane Gordon of Brooklyn entitles her to membership in a less and less exclusive Albany club: Since 2003, seven state lawmakers from New York City have been accused of crimes. That amounts to about 1 in 10 members of the city’s delegation to Albany.

The offenses range from the relatively petty — throwing a cup of hot coffee at an employee to the felonious, like bribe-taking. In Ms. Gordon’s case, according to Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, in exchange for helping a developer secure a vacant tract of land she asked him to build her a $500,000 house in Queens, outside her district.

The disproportionate number of arrests raises questions about whether the political culture of Albany — where, the novelist William Kennedy wrote, “Life without gravy is not life’’ — tempts lawmakers to brush up against the law by abusing their power and perks.

“I’m amazed at the brazenness of my colleagues,” said State Senator David A. Paterson, a Manhattan Democrat and the Senate minority leader. “There’s a higher rate of allegations made against public servants than against the public itself.”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Democrat of Manhattan, seemed unfazed by the cumulative accusations of criminality and volunteered several caveats. A vast majority of legislators are honest, he said.

Some of the seven are no longer in the Legislature. Some have merely been accused, not convicted. The gravity of the offenses varies widely. And, the Legislature is, after all, a mirror of our democracy.

“We don’t pick our members,” Mr. Silver said. “Members are sent by their communities to the Legislature. We just happen to gather together.”

Moreover, he said the Legislature has already done its best to impose higher standards.

“As far as honesty is concerned, there’s nothing we can legislate — things are already against the law,” he said. “The overwhelming fact is, most member are hard working, decent and honest. There are rotten eggs in every profession and this is no different.”

Senator Paterson, who is running for his party’s nomination for lieutenant governor, said that without passing judgment on those legislators who have not been convicted, he blamed “the overall dysfunction of the Albany culture” where, he said, “trust is derived out of deal-making and patronage rather than by trying to establish good government.”

He said many legislators “arrogate to themselves all sorts of responsibility and are treated by staff as royalty,” and added: “These are people who work very hard and people who are probably underpaid and who many times try to placate the public, such as everybody wants energy, but nobody wants to site it in their district. That takes a toll. There’s an anxiety that’s produced in elected officials. The passive-aggressive conduct is to then feel a certain entitlement. That is the fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Albany is not unique among state capitals, of course, or even among legislative bodies. No moral compass automatically points to Brooklyn either, home to most of the latest accused miscreants, or, for that matter, to New York City.

In the 19th century, the city’s old Board of Aldermen was commonly known collectively as “The 40 Thieves.” In the 1970’s,Henry J. Stern, then a member of the board’s successor, the City Council, estimated that “the rate of indictment of council members was higher than the rate for teenagers in the South Bronx.” (In 2003, after a councilman was shot at City Hall by a political rival, Mr. Stern put the odds of an incumbent getting assassinated as greater than his losing an election.)

Still, in the pantheon of ethically challenged politicians, Albany has, historically, earned a special place.

The state capital of New York was moved north about 50 miles, from Kingston to Albany, in 1797. In Albany, 143 miles up the river from New York City and with one-tenth its population at the time, the State Legislature could function, to use the term loosely, in the dead of winter and still get out of town in time for spring planting (after the Legislature left, hoteliers and restaurateurs would complain that patronage was down).

During much of the 20th century, Albany itself was run by Dan O’Connell’s immutable political machine, a Democratic dynasty, which even Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, elected as a relentless prosecutor, could not dislodge. In 1972, state officials detailed a litany of corruption and concluded: “Our investigation establishes that the city of Albany has been had.” To which Paul J. Curran, the chairman of the State Investigation Commission, interjected, “The question is, was it rape or something else?”

That the imagination is boundless was suggested again last week by the indictment of Assemblywoman Gordon, who represents Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn. Her lawyer said she would contest the charges that she tried to secure a house from a developer, and added that she would seek re-election.

She was the third member of the Assembly from Brooklyn to be charged with a crime in recent years. Roger L. Green pleaded guilty to falsely billing the state for travel expenses, resigned, ran for his seat again and won, and is now running for Congress. Clarence Norman Jr. was convicted in his first two trials on felony larceny charges for soliciting illegal campaign contributions. (He was acquitted of other charges in a third trial, and a fourth is pending; he resigned from the Assembly last year.)

Assemblywoman Gloria Davis of the Bronx, who resigned after pleading guilty in 2003 to bribery. Senator Guy J. Velella of the Bronx, one of the few Republicans who represents the city, resigned and pleaded guilty in 2004 to bribe-taking. Early last year, State Senator Kevin S. Parker of Brooklyn was charged with punching a traffic enforcement officer. (The charges were dismissed, reportedly after he agreed to enroll in an anger management course.)

In March, Senator Ada L. Smith of Queens was charged with assault for throwing coffee at a legislative assistant. That same month federal authorities investigating accusations of bid rigging raided the offices of Queens Assemblyman Brian M. McLaughlin, who has denied any wrongdoing. That’s eight.

“I think one member would be too high,” said Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, who succeeded Mr. Norman as the Brooklyn Democratic leader.

“People get into politics for a lot of different reasons,” said Gerald Benjamin a political scientist and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the State University at New Paltz. “One reason is that politics is a path for mobility for people who are less credentialed. People with a high level of energy can get to a position of high status if they don’t have a college degree or didn’t go to a prestigious school. They ask themselves, ‘Why can’t I do that?’ It’s sort of like sports.

“There is a structural lack of accountability in New York politics, so once you get into office you don’t feel threatened, like there’s going to be an election or a primary,” Professor Benjamin continued. “You become entrenched.“

According to a survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures, New York’s has among the lowest turnover rates. In the last decade, the largest number of legislators who lost any general election was five of the 150 assemblymen and 62 senators.

Grant Reeher, a political science professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, said one reason for the high rate of criminal charges against elected officials was that “political enemies, law enforcement agencies, and the press all have their gun sights set on them, and that must add to the likelihood of being found out. Bringing down a politician is a big-game kill, after all. So I wonder whether their actual rate of bad behavior whether or not it’s exposed exceeds that in the corporate sector.”

Martin Shefter, a government professor at Cornell, said another reason was that legislators have “greater discretion to give or withhold valuable benefits to the people with whom they deal than do the practitioners of other professions.”

Good government groups blame weak ethics laws and lack of accountability.

“I don’t think they think there are an awful lot of people watching,” said Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director of the League of Women Voters.

Rachel Leon, executive director of Common Cause New York, said “the combination of lax laws and very weak or nonexistent enforcement increases the potential that even good people are going to do bad things. The honor system doesn’t work.”

EDITORIAL DESK
The Pimps' Friends in Albany
By BOB HERBERT (NYT) 718 words
Published: July 6, 2006

LINK

A study a couple of years ago found that the State Legislature in New York was the most dysfunctional in America. The study, conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, described a gridlocked legislative process that accomplished remarkably little.
Here's an example of the dysfunction in action.

Early last year a Democratic assemblyman from the Bronx, Jeffrey Dinowitz, introduced a bill to fight sex trafficking. It had overwhelming support in the Assembly, which is not surprising. Other than the johns and the pimps, who's out there championing forced prostitution?

Mr. Dinowitz hoped, through his legislation, to establish two new crimes in New York: trafficking a person for sexual servitude and trafficking a person for labor servitude.

Sex trafficking -- the coercing of women and girls into the sex trade -- is no small problem in New York and across the U.S. Attempts to specify the number of trafficking victims have proved unreliable. But federal officials believe many thousands of women and girls are forced into prostitution each year, and thousands more are put to work against their will in massage parlors, strip clubs and other corners of the sex-for-money industry.

Some victims are literally held under lock and key as sex slaves. Others are threatened with violence if they don't cooperate, or are told that their relatives will be harmed. Some are obliged to work to pay off financial 'obligations.' It is common for immigrants to be forced into prostitution after being lured to the U.S. with false promises of legitimate work. They have their passports confiscated and their money stolen, and are left at the mercy of pimps and madams.

Mr. Dinowitz's bill was a modest attempt to fight this unconscionable exploitation of vulnerable women and girls. It would have made trafficking a Class C felony, with penalties ranging from probation for a first-time offender to a maximum of 15 years in prison. It would have modestly raised the penalties for patronizing prostitutes, making it easier to jail chronic offenders. And it would have addressed the problem of sex tourism, in which tour companies arrange trips from the U.S. to foreign countries so the tourists -- invariably men -- can have sex with foreign prostitutes, many of whom have been forced into the sex trade, and some of whom are children.

The bill hit a few roadblocks. The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, and others felt that some of the bill's language was too broad. The speaker, his staffers and other interested parties went to work on it, reworking the language and narrowing the bill's focus.

But they did more than add precision to the language of the bill. They watered the bill down.

Although the speaker and members of his staff insisted that the crimes covered by the bill were 'serious felonies,' they lowered the crime of trafficking to a Class D felony, making it much easier for convicted sex traffickers to escape prison time altogether.

Additional penalties against johns were scrapped, as was any reference to sex tourism. And so on.

The bill then passed the Assembly and was sent over to the Senate.

But the Republican-controlled Senate had its own anti-trafficking measure and touted it with bombastic language. The sponsor of the Senate bill, Frank Padavan of Queens, declared that 'human trafficking is a despicable form of modern slavery, and it is unthinkable that it would be allowed to flourish in our democracy.'

The Padavan bill would have made sex trafficking a Class C felony, but it equated sexual servitude with labor servitude in a way that suggested -- perhaps inadvertently -- that being a prostitute was just another job, like farm work, or garment-making. Unlike the Dinowitz bill, it offered no services to the victims of trafficking. And it did not allow women charged with prostitution to use the fact that they had been trafficked as a defense.

Neither house of the Legislature gave the other house's bill serious consideration. Last week the Assembly and the Senate adjourned without making any genuine attempt to actually enact a law against sex trafficking. It was a big win for the pimps and the madams.

The state's effort to combat trafficking in New York could hardly have been more ineffective. The Legislature's status as the most dysfunctional in the nation seems secure.

New York State Ethics Commission

EXTREME MAKEOVER: ALBANY
A state of dysfunction
Excelsior, New York's motto of 'ever upward,' has evolved to mean 'ever outward,' as tens of thousands of people flee Albany's tyranny; it's time to get them back
By KEVIN WALTER
News Editorial Writer
4/30/2006

LINK

The decision to move from New York could hardly have been more agonizing for Connie and Tony Toledo, but they felt they had no choice. Tony had been laid off, and the state's hostile business policies undermined the towing business he subsequently started. So the family left Buffalo for North Carolina.
It was 2001 when Tony said goodbye to his lifelong hometown and Connie's adopted home of 15 years. The move devastated everyone: Tony, a product of Lafayette High School and a devoted Bills fan; his father, Daniel, distraught over his son's departure; and the couple's oldest child, Rachelle, a high school freshman and cheerleader who tumbled into a yearlong depression.

"It was rough," remembered Connie.

The Toledos and other families whose experiences are recounted here are but a few of hundreds of thousands of people who fled upstate New York over the past 40 years. They didn't leave because of too much snow, or the Bills' Super Bowl frustrations, or lack of a new Peace Bridge; they didn't decamp for Florida, North Carolina or Arizona because they liked hurricanes, drought and wildfires.

They left to survive, to find work and an affordable cost of living, with a survivable tax burden. They relocated to escape a state government that's beholden to special labor, lawyer and lobbying interests and pays scant attention to taxpayers' needs.

It's not new that New Yorkers pulled up stakes - Excelsior, the state's motto, meaning "ever upward," seems modified to "ever outward" - or that Albany's government continually undermines its people. But the time is long past to try to fix it.

In this article and in editorials today through Thursday, The Buffalo News sets out to offer solutions to a dysfunctional state government. They include a constitutional amendment on term limits; objective redistricting to create competitive elections; further breaking the power of three leaders in Albany; developing electoral accountability, rather than responsiveness to special interests; and re-establishing a two-party system, with legitimate divergent philosophies that give voters a choice and legislators a vision. Finally, and perhaps most doable, voters need to shrug off their slumber and fight back, taking power and demanding meaningful reforms after they throw the bums out.

For their part, the Toledo family tried to stay, wanted to stay. Unable to find work after he was laid off from International Imaging - just eight months after the birth of the couple's third child - Tony cashed in his retirement savings and borrowed $25,000 from his parents to start a towing business. But he said that under the weight of the region's weak economy and New York's exorbitant worker's compensation costs, the venture collapsed. They had to go.

Here is the difference between the economies of Buffalo and Greensboro, N.C. Once Tony started looking for work there, it took only a couple of days to land a job and a relocation package. He now works for Golden State Foods, a supplier to McDonald's, and Connie works as an account representative for a national mortgage company.

Rachelle, now 18 and adjusted to her new life, is a college student (education costs are lower, the Toledos say). Finally, Tony's parents, also lifelong Buffalonians, packed up and headed South to be near their family.

It was an ordeal, its pistons driven by the Albany job-killing machine. Still, Connie said, the Toledos agree that their anguish never altered this fundamental fact: Because of this region's feeble economy and the obstacles New York puts in the way of business, they were left without an alternative.

"It was the best decision we could have made," she said.

Numbers set the stage

The numbers only begin to tell the woeful tale of New York, but they make a stark beginning. The figures - on tax burdens, public spending and population transfer, among others - outline a story of a government run amok and a state run into the ditch.

But numbers are cold. They only hint at the repercussions they have dealt to the residents of this woefully mismanaged state: fractured hopes, lost opportunities, divided families. The reasons behind those misfortunes are multiple and complex, but from a public policy standpoint, they distill to Albany's deluded belief that New York is still the Empire State, a realm so splendid that Americans will pay any price to live within its golden borders.

The numbers give the lie to that milk-and-honey fantasy, as well. Here are some, from Governing magazine's State & Local Source Book for 2005 (figures are per capita, unless otherwise noted):

• Total tax revenue, state and local, was the nation's highest, $4,645.

• Property tax revenue was fifth-highest, $1,402.

• Total spending was second highest, $10,376.

• State and local debt was second highest, $10,306.

• Welfare spending was highest, $1,699, even though the number of recipients per 10,000 residents was only 16th highest.

• K-12 education spending (state and local) was second highest, $2,001, even though school enrollment as a share of total population was fourth lowest. Spending per-pupil was highest, $12,059.

• The average pay of state and local employees was second highest, at $52,450.

• The state was 40th in "economic momentum," a ranking of one-year changes in employment, personal income and population. (It's not about cold and snow, either. Wyoming, Minnesota and New Hampshire ranked 16, 17 and 18. The Dakotas were 7 and 8.)

The consequences of such numbers are both pernicious and predictable. People are leaving. New York's share of the national population has steadily eroded, from 9.8 percent at mid-century to 6.5 percent last year, according to the U.S. Census.

Then, New York controlled 43 of Congress' 435 seats. Today it holds 29. That's a 32 percent decline. Less representation, less power; less power, less money.

Growth is slow

It's not that the state isn't growing; it's just that others are growing much faster, a trend that is expected to continue. Census projections are that from 2000 to 2030, New York will grow more slowly than all but four states. Meanwhile, some areas within New York - including Buffalo - are, in fact, shrinking, leaving fewer residents to pay the ever-rising tax bill.

New York is the alcoholic among the states, not simply unable to moderate its self-destructive behavior but uninterested in doing so. What's needed is an intervention. New York needs to treat not just the symptoms of its compulsion but the underlying disease. It needs to revitalize its enervated democracy by injecting healthy doses of competition - which is to say, fear - into the political process.

Independent redistricting, an effective Legislature committee system and a spirited opposition party are three of the most important reforms needed, but none will happen unless voters scream it into Albany's besotted face.

Otherwise, it's pass the bottle.

Families split up

It doesn't sound like a mother's fondest wish, but Kathleen Jarnot says she's glad her children moved away.

Glad is a relative term, of course. Jarnot would rather her children lived nearby, but jobs are scarce. Things would have been difficult for them had they remained in Western New York, where the children and their parents were born. So her son Jeff left for Virginia while daughters Susan and Jennifer headed west to California.

"We have wonderful colleges here, but the jobs are there, and I'm glad they went there," said Jarnot, who lives with her husband Daniel in Cheektowaga.

Daniel Jarnot understands that reality, as well, but he is less forgiving of it. Not only are his children far away, his only grandson lives in California.

"You lose the normal family life," he said. "I don't like it at all."

For his part, Jeff has few regrets about his move to Reston, Va., where he works in sales for Oracle, the software giant. Now 36, he worked in sales here for 11/2 years after graduating from the State University of New York at Potsdam, but soon realized opportunities for advancement were scarce in Western New York.

In 1995, while visiting a friend in Reston, he saw that the Washington Post's "help wanted" section was overflowing with ads. He quit his job, sent out six resumes and quickly landed a new position after just two interviews.

"In Buffalo, you could spend a long time finding a job," he said.

Jarnot has lived in Virginia for 11 years and, but for lingering sorrow over leaving an area he still loves, never looked back. Why would he? He is selling a house whose value has risen 300 percent since he bought it in 1997. In Cheektowaga, the sale price of the average single-family home rose just 14 percent over the same period, according to the Buffalo Niagara Association of Realtors. That's less than one-twentieth the rate of increase.

Badly out of step

New York didn't get this way by accident. In almost every way - economically, culturally, politically, municipally - the state is in a class by itself. It contains within its borders extremes of wealth and poverty. It was, and continues to be, a primary port of entry for immigrants. It includes a spectacularly complex city that is far-and-away the nation's largest, an economic engine and power base unto itself.

As one former state legislator observed, it's no surprise that a state so steeped in diversity - and in so many forms of it - would look different at the governmental level.

But it's one thing to expect the occasional departure from national norms, and far more consequential when government becomes a compendium of radical departures, most moving it in damaging directions for its people's welfare.

How consequential? Enough to spawn a Legislature so deviant it has been crowned as the country's most dysfunctional.

That's a disorder with its own consequences, including a penchant for restricting the flow of information from, to and within the Legislature, and for delivering squeaky-wheel policies that benefit favored groups even as they drive out jobs, opportunity and population.

Much of the reason for New York's idiosyncratic government traces to downstate, a region of enormous political clout, vast disparities of wealth and about zero interest in Albany. Overwhelmingly Democratic, it elects liberals who have so weighted state government to the left that Republicans - never too conservative to begin with - are satisfied with playing me-too politics.

Instead of offering a competing, perhaps healthier, vision of state government, the putatively conservative party has at best surrendered and at worst joined the opposition. New York Republicans are the ideological prisoners of their political adversaries, and content to be so.

Unchecked Republican control could be awful, too, of course (see Washington). The problem arises from the failure of a democratic imperative: a vigorous opposition.

A spending machine

With virtually no political competition to restrain the wild horses of the Democratic left, state government is a runaway spending machine devoted first to self-preservation, second to its sugar-daddy sponsors and, lastly, to the New Yorkers they are sworn to represent (and then, often with an asterisk attached). Consider:

• Spending: Even with two-thirds of the government in Republican hands (the party owns the Senate and has held the governor's office since 1995), state spending has nonetheless risen by an average of 6.5 percent a year, 21/2 times the average rate of inflation.

And that's with the conservatives holding sway. During the 12 years Mario M. Cuomo was governor, when Democrats held the balance of power, annual spending increases averaged a dizzying 11.6 percent percent, though the ratio to inflation was about the same.

And remember: Those feverish growth rates are for a state whose per-capita spending is already the nation's second highest.

• Self-preservation: New York lawmakers are expert at drawing "designer districts" - with oddly drawn boundaries whose purpose is to deliver to incumbents of both parties legislative districts that only a cadaver could lose.

In complying with the constitutional requirement to ensure proportional representation, states must draw new districts after each census. Like many states, though, New York turns what should be a civic act into a political one, bending lines to pack enough partisans into any given district that a candidate of the wrong party has no chance of winning. Democrats keep the Assembly and Republicans the Senate.

As Barbara Bartoletti of the New York State League of Women Voters told a local audience this year: "Your elected officials get to choose you before you choose them."

That's only the start of how lawmakers in New York maneuver to protect their electoral flanks. Strategically lax rules on lobbying, fund-raising and ethics give them a huge advantage over challengers, enough to discourage many potential opponents even from running.

In addition, New York is one of the few states with an unregulated system of "member items" - tax dollars given to individual legislators to distribute as they see fit. It's a kind of legalized vote-buying.

• Favored groups: If you're a health care worker, a trial lawyer or one of a few other special interests, good news. The levers of influence are within your grasp. If you're but a taxpayer, or a small business owner trying to make it in an unfriendly state, you'll have to get in line. Your problems may not be completely irrelevant to lawmakers (then again, they may), but they are of decidedly less interest.

A couple of examples: Until Congress invalidated an antiquated state statute last year, car companies could be held liable, sometimes for millions of dollars, if one of their leasing customers injured someone while driving the vehicle. Part of the reason that law remained on the books is the political clout of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, which wanted to retain a law that gave them easy access to potentially rich lawsuits. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a lawyer, is associated with a personal injury law firm.

Even more scandalously, the state's most powerful health care labor union, SEIU Local 1199, drove a massive increase in the state's Medicaid program a few years ago. Sitting at the public negotiating table as Gov. George E. Pataki and the two legislative leaders hammered out the bill was the union president, Dennis Rivera. The reason: State leaders, especially Pataki, were intimidated by the public beating Rivera and his wealthy organization could give them. Rivera and his interests cut to the front of the line.

• The public interest: Fair-minded people would acknowledge that the 1999 expansion of Medicaid, which created an insurance program known as Family Health Plus, included a legitimate public component - even if it was rammed through the Legislature for political reasons with no hearings, no debate and no real sense of its implications. The program, serving New York's working poor, had a March enrollment of more than half a million people.

Ah, but that asterisk. The program was, at its inception, an expensive payoff to an unelected powerbroker. Hofstra University law professor Eric Lane is more caustic about it. A former chief counsel to the State Senate minority and primary researcher on the report that tagged the Legislature as "dysfunctional," Lane calls the Rivera power grab a "sleaze job."

If an essential part of lawmakers' job is to be good and honest stewards of New Yorkers' tax dollars, then they failed. It's not a recent problem, either.

High taxes a burden

It didn't take Gary Newton long to figure out he was going to have to leave Western New York to pursue a career in agriculture. Unable to find work after he graduated from the State University of New York at Geneseo with a bachelor of science degree, he left Niagara County for the Peace Corps.

He returned to Middleport two years later but stayed less than half a year. With his best job prospect setting out rat bait in Niagara Falls, he left again, this time to pursue his doctorate.

That was 27 years ago. In more than a quarter century, things haven't changed in upstate New York. Or in Albany, which he believes shares responsibility for the region's economic blight.

"I have cousins and an aunt and uncle still in Western New York," said Newton, a researcher and professor at Prairie View A&M University near Houston. "They complain about the high taxes."

High is right, especially compared to Texas, with no income tax and property tax rates that would make a New Yorker swoon. Newton and his wife own an 1,800-square-foot house that sits on half an acre. Their combined property tax bill - county, city and school - is $1,500.

A quarter century on, Newton says he still misses the area, and as recently as a year ago was looking for ways to return. A possibility at SUNY-Geneseo didn't pan out, so it's on to year 28.

A history of corruption

A thread of corruption runs through the history of government in New York, especially over the past century or so. And while today's corruption is less about criminality than it is about sustaining a purposefully anti-democratic power structure, the roots of the tree reach deep into the soil of a felonious past.

Tammany Hall is a prime example. The corrupt Democratic political machine that ruled New York City politics for decades was a de facto influence on Albany, as well.

Under the influence of Tammany Hall and its then-leader, William Marcy Tweed - "Boss Tweed" - the governor and Legislature passed laws specifically designed to give Tammany greater ability to ply its corruption, including the outright thievery of public money.

If that kind of overt criminality has largely bleached out of state government, its stain lingers in a conspiracy of practices designed to stifle democratic debate by concentrating power in the two legislative leaders.

Other, more legitimate reasons may also help explain that kind of autocratic power structure. By some observers' reckoning, for example, the state's vast scale of social and economic diversity requires a strong leadership model to prevent the chambers from splintering into hostile factions.

Nevertheless, the parallels between the Legislature and the corrupt political boss system are evident. In each, the leader calls the shots, and the followers - that is, the remaining 215 state legislators - do as they're told, or else they're punished. They don't ask too many questions and they don't have too much power, but they hold safe seats, draw healthy paychecks and, for better or worse, leave some kind of mark on the history of New York.

"You can see Tammany Hall, without the corruption," said Lane.

A network of abuses

The Brennan Center for Justice detailed this and other government disorders two years ago in an explosive report called "The New York State Legislative Process: An Evaluation and Blueprint for Reform." The report, which famously (and accurately) tagged the New York State Legislature as the nation's "most dysfunctional," contained a laundry list of offenses that empower the leaders, penalize taxpayers and insulate the institution from the competition of adversaries and, worse, of ideas.

These include:

• A sham system of legislative committees that rarely considers pending bills and whose staffs are beholden to each chamber's leader.

• An approval system that discourages or prevents debate on pending legislation.

• Unequal funding of legislators' staff costs, depending on their political party.

• Iron control by each leader over which bills make it to the floor for a vote. That ensures that only bills the leaders favor can become law, and given the unhealthy influence leaders exert over their timorous members, that every bill that comes to a vote passes.

Most broadly, the report cites five fundamental values served by a well-functioning legislature - representativeness, deliberativeness, accessibility, accountability and efficiency - and concludes that New York's Legislature flunks all of them. The report is available online at www.brennancenter.org.

The report caused a flurry of activity in Albany, where the state budget, late for 20 consecutive years, arrived on time in 2005, as it did this year. And some legitimate reforms followed, including an end to "empty-seat voting" in the Assembly. That's the process by which lawmakers who sign in for the day were automatically counted as having voted with the majority unless they make a point to show up and vote otherwise. The Senate's response was muddier, but Bartoletti, of the League of Women Voters, said she's seen no substantive change.

But the history of Albany reform is to do as little as possible, declare a new day and go about business as usual. That's what has happened since the detonation of the Brennan Center report.

Departing is such sorrow

It pains Thomas Mullane that he had to leave his native Buffalo. And it distresses him that he may never be able to return to an area he calls home to "some of the nicest people in the world."

But in North Carolina, Mullane found professional success that he says would never have been his had he remained in the economic wasteland of upstate New York. He also found lower taxes, a friendlier business climate and citizens who do not make a lifelong project of hindering their region's progress.

Mullane, his wife Kim and their two young children left Buffalo for Winston-Salem last May. The 39-year-old insurance investigator saw no prospect of professional advancement anywhere in upstate New York and made the wrenching decision to leave behind not only the city he loves, but his larger family.

It was the right choice, he said. In Winston-Salem, his family settled into a 2,100-square-foot home, about 25 percent larger than the home he left but with a tax bill almost 60 percent smaller.

"It's amazing to me," said Mullane, who keeps up on Buffalo. "Taxes are still in the forefront of the news there, but they're not a story in North Carolina. They're just not an issue."

As with the Toledo family, the Mullanes' move had a domino effect. Not long after he left, his wife's parents made the jump, too, partly to find work and partly to be near their grandchildren. One family fled New York, pulling another in its wake.

Mullane says his mother still hopes he'll return to this area, but he's doubtful.

"I love Buffalo," he said, "and I like New York State . . . If they just made it friendlier to live there . . ."

e-mail kwalter@buffnews.com