THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATIVE PROCESS: AN ...

THE IMPACT OF NEW YORK’S DYSFUNCTIONAL LEGISLATIVE PROCESS 47
tive drafting is confined to “Central Staff ” directed ultimately by the legislative
leaders. The substantive negotiations, drafting, amendments, and resolution of
different approaches occur behind closed doors among the Speaker, Majority
Leader, and Governor and their staff. Because conference committees are rarely
used to resolve disputes, if the two chambers do not pass identical bills agreed to
by these leaders, the legislation dies. In other words, the committee system in New
York fails to provide any independent laboratories for policy development with
any realistic hope of producing the final legislation that becomes law. Nor does
New York’s committee system provide a forum for members to debate and
deliberate to ensure that favorably reported bills embody the best policy solutions
to meet the public’s interests. For these reasons, New Yorkers are deprived of a
significant value of legislative process, namely better legislation to address
society’s complex problems.
■■ INADEQUATE REVIEW OF LEGISLATION
The lack of debate, deliberation, and review of legislation prior to a final floor
vote has produced laws that include troubling errors or, in certain cases, laws that
would not have been passed if they had received public or legislative scrutiny.
These errors range from unnecessary grammatical and syntactical errors that
may impair enforcement and judicial interpretation of such laws to massive
financial expenditures that arguably do not benefit the people of New York.
Although it is impossible to prove what would have happened with a different
legislative process, the following examples suggest that more substantial committee
involvement, significant debate and mark-ups, and compliance with the aging
requirement rather than resort to messages of necessity could have led to a
sounder outcome:
■ Union Health Care Worker Package. The Health Care Workforce
Recruitment and Retention Act of 2002 was passed after negotiations among
the Governor, Speaker, and Majority Leader, without any debate or hearings.
The Insurance and Health Committees in each house never saw or voted on
the bill. The final bill was passed using a message of necessity, in the middle
of the night, without any chance for the legislators to review it. According to
Senator Thomas Duane (D-Manhattan), “maybe a half-dozen legislators and
maybe 20 staff people saw it before it arrived on our desk [and] it was like a
Bible. It was such a huge bill.” It was widely reported that Governor Pataki
negotiated the bill, which provided $1.8 billion in raises for health care workers
in SEIU Local 1199, in exchange for the political endorsement of Dennis
Rivera, the president of Local 1199, in the 2002 gubernatorial race. In a year
when the New York State budget featured a $5 billion deficit, critics asserted
that this law represented a fiscally irresponsible result of pure politics and
personal lobbying. While Governor Pataki received the union’s endorsement,
Local 1199 and the hospital association with which it is affiliated contributed
$281,200 to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s legislative campaign
committee and $230,350 to Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno’s Senate