JCOPE to Meet on Tuesday, September 27

The Joint Commission on Public Ethics (JCOPE) holds its next meeting tomorrow at 10:30 am at its office in Albany.  The meeting agenda is here.

In terms of JCOPE’s agenda items, the most interesting part of the meeting should be JCOPE’s “Plan for development of Lobbying Act Regulations.”  This appears to indicate that JCOPE staff is preparing regulations to implement the Lobbying Act, which means a full-blown rulemaking process under the State Administrative Procedures Act (SAPA).

Under this process, JCOPE will write a proposed rule (or series of rules), and also prepare a Regulatory Impact Statement to address the impact on regulated parties.  The public will have an opportunity to comment on the proposed regulations, and JCOPE must consider these comments before adopting final rules.

While Lobbying Act regulations should not be expected to be in place for quite some time, if done well they could prove to be very useful for the regulated community in terms of lobbying compliance.