Malcolm Smith Promises A New Atmosphere In Albany

As I have been canvassing around Queens in the last few weeks and talking to voters, the one thing voters can agree on is that Albany is broken and needs to be changed. The culture of corruption up there is horrendous and because of that, nothing for the people of our state really gets accomplished. The only winners have been the wealthy contributors to campaigns, particularly developers and other well-off rich people that have gotten extra breaks at the expense of the rest of us. Well whether or not you approve of Malcolm Smith, the atmosphere he is promising (if gets to remain Leader of the future Majority) is markedly different from the current one.

From The NY Times:

ALBANY — Malcolm A. Smith, the minority leader of the State Senate, is promising something drastic, by Albany standards, if Democrats win control of the chamber on Tuesday. He wants to share power with rank-and-file lawmakers.

Whether he will follow through remains to be seen. But in an interview, Mr. Smith, a Queens Democrat, who would be the state’s first black majority party leader if his party gains control of the Senate, listed a litany of the sweeping promises politicians make when they stand outside the levers of power.

He said he would reinvent the Senate’s committees, which often have little discernable authority, and make them work more like committees do in Congress. He said he would move to cut the Senate majority’s central staff by at least 15 percent, or roughly 100 workers. He said he would narrow the wide gap between the resources allocated to majority and minority party members for office budgets. And he would move quickly to introduce legislation to publicly finance elections, despite the state’s fiscal crisis.

As the Times goes on to remark, many are skeptical of Smith's promises and that we as a state have been failed by politicians with similar claims in the past. However, no one can deny that things are broken the way our state government is constructed now. The only way we can find out if we can get change is to create change ourselves and hold the politicians to their promises. First we elect good people like Addabbo, Mesi, Gennaro, Foley and others, then we pressure them to push the legislation we want from proposals to bills and then into action.