Cuomo: Moreland panel will shut down

Casey Seiler, Capitol bureau chief

In a 45-minute conference call with reporters, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his Moreland Commission panel on public corruption will be mothballed if the state Legislature approves the ethics reform components included in the just-struck $138 billion budget deal.

Cuomo said the panel had helped bring legislative leaders to the point where they’d agree to the package of reforms, which creates an independent enforcement unit within the state Board of Elections, new public corruption felonies and tougher bribery laws, and steps up lobbying disclosure.

“If this package is adopted, then I would end the Moreland Commission,” Cuomo told reporters.

The package, however, stops well short of creating a public financing system for statewide and legislative races, but instead creates a pilot program for such a system restricted to the 2014 Comptroller’s race. Cuomo noted that the current makeup of the Senate — where Republicans stand opposed to public financing and Democrats can’t currently muster 32 votes for it — made a more robust system politically impossible.

http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/209720/cuomo-moreland-panel-will-shut-down/