Learn more about Andrew’s plan to Clean Up Albany:

We must fundamentally reform our system to give voices to all New Yorkers, not just the special interests. To accomplish this, we must enact a voluntary system of public financing, make sure legislative lines are drawn independently and enact stricter campaign finance laws to give New Yorkers a real voice in their government.

We must establish independent ethics commissions on State and local levels with robust enforcement powers to investigate and punish violations of law.  We must protect the State’s largest single fund by replacing the sole trustee with a board of trustees and end “pay to play” in the pension fund by enacting tough laws to prevent conflicts of interest. We must increase transparency, including by requiring financial disclosures that specifically address conflicts of interest and severely limit campaign contributions from public contractors and lobbyists, refusing contracts to contributors who have exceeded those limits.

Andrew Cuomo has made fighting public corruption a central component of his work as Attorney General and will continue to root out corruption as Governor. We must strip pensions for public officials who are convicted of a felony in relation to their office.  Moreover, we must expand the crimes of defrauding the government and official misconduct; enhance the punishment for betrayals of public trust, allowing for forfeiture of salary paid during period of time that a public servant or government employee engaged in criminal conduct relating to his or her job;  change the penal law to reform criminal bribery statutes so that acts of bribery can be more easily prosecuted; and make it a felony to make a false statement to state investigators in order to ensure integrity of investigations.

Building on Attorney General Cuomo’s “Project Sunlight”,  Open NY is a technology-based system that will further increase transparency and improve government performance by including powerful internal search features; ensuring State data is searchable from the web via search engines; making government information available via a central website in an easily accessible format; requiring the posting of a “spending report” card, which will make it clear what taxpayer funded projects are working and which are failing; and, promoting participation and collaboration to spur innovation and fosters public opportunities to improve government—a new kind of public participation.

In order to achieve lasting reform in many areas, we must amend our State’s Constitution to enact into law important reforms including overhauling our redistricting process, ethics enforcement, and succession rules, among others. We must create a constitutional commission and reform the delegate selection process so that we may convene a constitutional convention to address the many areas of reform that cannot be addressed by statutes alone.