Changes in the wind observed in Albany
BRIAN ACKLEY Political Columnist
These days, it's hard to know exactly when state politicians are simply pandering to score public points or are being swept up in a surging tsunami of change that will eventually crash on the capitol's shores to wipe away Albany's old guard.

The growing ripples, however, still firmly indicate the latter, as indicated by a move last week by new attorney general Andrew Cuomo, who someday might be the state's next big political thing to ascend from that rank.

The governor's son needed all of 90 days to tackle the nefarious netherworld known as state agencies and authorities that for decades, including his dad's tenure, have masqueraded as quasi-public bodies intent on protecting their seemingly unassailable and largely unleashed powers. Let's just say that if they were part of the food chain, most of these nonelected boards would be the current equivalent of trans fat.

Cuomo last week stepped into that shadowy world, ruling that members of the New York State Housing Finance Agency and the New York State Mortgage Agency would no longer receive health insurance benefits as part of what was supposed to be their compensationless service to the state. We'll set aside for a moment the question of how in tarnation taxpayers are served by having one board serve a function that is duplicitous of the very definition of the other.

Never mind a 1992 state law, no shades of gray here, which reads that those serving on such boards were explicitly banned from accepting "salary or other compensation." Cuomo generously said the practice was a "misunderstanding" of civil service law. And never mind that it wasn't enough just that members got that happy handout during the time while actually serving on the agency's boards. The premiums were to be paid for life.

Importantly, too, the lady who had her lips wrapped around the whistle was Priscilla Almodovar, the paid executive of both agencies, who was appointed by Gov. Reform, Eliot Spitzer. One current SONYMA director, who voted in favor of the perk, told the Albany Times Union, which first reported the practice earlier this year, that he did so because, "It was a situation where Gov. Pataki essentially cleared this."

Almodovar's toot wasn't necessarily of eardrum-shattering proportions, mind you, at least in the fact that only a half dozen or so of current and past board members were getting the free health-care ride. It warranted only a few paragraphs in many state newspapers, no mention at all in others. Regardless of the size of the fish, that the net has been cast can only be an encouraging sign.

Cuomo, who has a tough act to follow, also scored reformer points recently with his monumentally inspired hiring of Blair Horner, who had spent a quarter century as one of New York State's chief critics as legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group. Horner will spearhead "Project Sunshine," a computer based initiative that will follow the money and relationships between everything from lobbyists to state contract holders to political donors to a vast array of special interest groups. Having spent two decades challenging the ethics and efficacy of Albany's ways, he won't have to dig as hard for bones in the graveyard.

"Transparency and disclosure to me are the pillars of restoring public integrity. People feel they don't understand their state government, that it doesn't represent them, that it is a captive of special interests, that unless you have big money, that government doesn't represent you," Cuomo said in making the appointment. Less than a month before the announcement, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno labeled NYPIRG leaders like Horner, "hard-core Democratic operatives."

It's not hard to tell which is the fresh, laundry crisp voice of change and which is the whiny, withered whimper of the status quo. All hands on deck; man the lifeboats. If it's not a tsunami, it's a pretty good-sized swell. Time for the legislative long tooths to catch the wave, or simply wave goodbye.

(Brian Ackley is a columnist for the Weekly Independent Newspapers of Western New York. To provide feedback on this column, visit our Web site at ww.wnynewspapers.com. Opinions expressed here are those of the author.)