Citizens Union Calls for Ethics Reform

At an event in Albany earlier today, good government group Citizens Union called for “comprehensive action on ethics reform” as part of the state budget to put “Albany on a path toward earning back the public trust.”

The reforms the group proposes include:

1. overhauling elected official compensation by capping and requiring disclosure of all outside income, while also substantially increasing legislative salaries;
2. strengthening ethics enforcement with more funding and a bigger role for JCOPE, and also changing JCOPE’s voting structure;
3. reforming campaign finance to end the personal use of campaign funds and close the LLC loophole; and
4. ending the use of the executive budget appropriations bills to force enactment of policy changes while increasing the transparency of all legislative and executive lump sum expenditures.

A one-page version of the group’s ethics reform agenda is here.