With Dean Skelos, the convicted former New York State Senate Majority Leader, and Sheldon Silver, the convicted New York State Assembly Speaker, both due to be sentenced on corruption charges next month, it should come as no surprised that 90% of New Yorkers believe that ethics violations are a major problem in Albany, according to a Quinnipiac Poll released on December 14, 2015.

The same poll found that a clear majority of the public, 64%, believes new laws are required to make elected state politicians behave ethically, while just 22% believe the arrests of Skelos and Silver will serve as a strong enough deterrent to compel elected state officials to clean up their acts.

As the Senate, Assembly and governor get down to serious budget negotiations, now would seem a good time to seriously tackle the issue. Indeed, a coalition of good-government groups has called for just that. The groups want the leaders in Albany to address the topic head-on and in public where the residents can see the negotiations in the light of day, rather than conducting them in the typical three-men-in-a-closed-door-room that everyone has come to expect from Albany.

The groups included the heads of Citizens Union, Cause New York, New York Public Interest Research Group, Brennan Center for Justice, League of Women Voters New York State and Reinvent Albany. They wrote about the imperative of making the creation of reforms a public process.

“The governor and legislative leaders have an obligation to New Yorkers to reach a significant agreement on ethics reform.

“We believe that in order for the agreement to be sufficiently consequential as to change the culture of how business is done in Albany and lessen the occurrence of corruption, it must be discussed and negotiated in the full view of the public.

“We call for public leaders’ meetings because we know that the typical Albany pattern will be to discuss ideas over the next few weeks during private negotiations and then secretly hammer out an ethics deal. That secret deal will then be heralded as ‘historic’ with ‘unprecedented new reforms’ that will be a silver bullet to resolve the state’s ethics shortcomings. The deal will be folded into the budget or end-of-session crush, and the details and practical effects of the new ‘reforms’ will not come to light until they are in operation.

“Over time, it will then become clear that loopholes in those ‘reforms’ will undermine many of their asserted benefits. Thus, what was heralded as ‘historic reforms’ will have little positive impact and Albany will return to its status quo—until the next scandal. As a result, New Yorkers’ confidence in the integrity of our state government will further erode. This is why it is critical that the leaders’ meetings must not be private, but public.”

The executives of these groups point out that many good ethics reforms have already been proposed for Albany. The reforms introduced by Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie include limiting outside income of legislators to “40% of the annual salary of New York State Supreme Court Justices.” The annual salary for judges for 2015/16 is $127,450, which would mean legislators could earn about $50,000 on top of a base pay of $90,000

Heastie’s proposal would also fix the so-called LLC loophole. Corporations are currently limited to donating $5,000 to a candidate in any one year, but Limited Liability Corporations were never covered by the law, so LLCs are used to funnel enormous amounts of money to candidates.

Another fix proposed by Heastie would be to limit the amount of campaign funds that go into “housekeeping” (funds that are supposed to be devoted to taking care of the physical plant, e.g. paying for electricity, janitorial services and such, but that are purportedly used as an inflated catchall and diverted to other purposes).

Taking steps to clean up elections and make campaigns more transparent, the Assembly majority will once again advance measures to close the LLC loophole and regulate the handling of “housekeeping money” by political party committees.

Another fix would be to tighten up the rules of how “housekeeping money” is kept and spent; current practice allows unlimited donations to housekeeping accounts.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo touched on these same areas in his state-of-the-state address in January. He, too, proposed new rules limiting legislators’ outside income, closing the LLC loophole and tightening the rules for housekeeping. But since then, Cuomo has not talked much about ethics reform, and it seems that other issues are more important to him. He has gone on a state tour to advance the cause of paid family leave, and the $15 minimum wage—both certainly worthy goals —but with Skelos and Silver being hauled off to jail last year, some might think that ethics would also be at the top of the agenda.

We urge our lawmakers to adopt new ethics rules before the end of the session in June this year, and we urge them to do it in public.