Taxpayers shouldn’t pay lawmakers’ sexual harassment settlements

Over the past 2 years lawmakers in Albany passed a litany of laws targeting sexual harassment in the workplace. Among them are standards concerning universal training, how claims are addressed in business-to-business relations, a lengthening of the statute of limitations, and a lowering of the burden of proof.

Coming with those laws was a lot of heavy-handed preaching and concern from lawmakers. One couldn’t help but find their accusations and stereotypes about the private sector to be offensive, even comical, given the history of New York government – they are a group of men (and women) who have proven through the years that some in their ranks get drunk on their power and can’t keep their hands or thoughts to themselves.

For starters, consider 3 cases of local import JCOPE (the Joint Commission on Public Ethics) settled this year.

In January, it levied a $10,000 civil penalty against former senator Marc Panepinto who, in 2018, pleaded guilty to attempting to cover-up unwanted sexual advances he made to a member of his staff.

In August, JCOPE settled, penalty-free, with Panepinto’s former chief of staff, Chris Savage, who had conversations with a staff member about future employment or monetary compensation in exchange for her silence in the harassment investigation.

Also in August, JCOPE settled with former assemblywomen Angela Wozniak who acknowledged she violated state law by making personnel decisions related to an employee she had a sexual relationship with, her legislative director who alleged that she had coerced him into that relationship.

It’s ironic that she followed in office Dennis Gabryszak who “retired” in 2014 as he faced allegations of harassment from 7 women who worked on his staff.

Last month, the state settled with one of those women for $125,000. Lawsuits brought by others affected by his behavior were dismissed because the women had waited too long to make the claims. Had that not happened, imagine the state’s payout to cover Gabryszak’s indiscretions.

The lawsuit filed by his successor’s aide is still being considered -- expect a larger payout since sexual relations were involved.

The settlement with Gabryszak’s accuser and, one day, Wozniak’s show something wrong with the current system: We – the taxpayers – are footing the bill for the disgusting behavior and actions of lawmakers.

Since 2000, more than 30 sitting state lawmakers have left office facing allegations of ethical misconduct. There are many more situations involving their aides or managers within offices of the executive branch who have abused their power. The amount spent on harassment settlements for all state employees exceeded $11 million from 2008 through 2017.

In most cases, they found themselves or will find themselves sheltered financially by public funds, money that could have been spent instead on infrastructure, parks, and schools. It’s a sort of “get out of jail free” card.  

It shouldn’t be that way and it doesn’t have to be. They should pay out for their own misdeeds.

Surprisingly, New York has made some headway in that regard….some.

In his 2018 State of the State Address Governor Andrew Cuomo said “no taxpayer funds should be used to pay for any public official’s sexual harassment or misconduct — period. It is the bad act of the individual, let the individual pay.”

The 2018-2019 state budget included that, requiring officers and employees of the state to reimburse the state for any public payment made upon a judgement of sexual harassment.

This is a very good start, but it doesn’t go far enough.

The state still makes the payment and then has to collect the money from the individual.

Could that happen in most cases?

No. If the settlement is large enough – since it’s with the state first, it likely will be – it would hit a level that would force the guilty party into bankruptcy, absolving him or her of the obligation.

Consider a $1 million settlement in 2010 when 2 women accused a supervisor at the Willard Drug Treatment Center of unwanted advances. In similar cases, do you really think the accused would be able to pay that back?

To fix the possibility of bankruptcy offering an easy out, lawmakers should amend state law to allow confiscation or cancellation of taxpayer-paid pensions from the guilty party, something other states are considering.

The state could also initiate law to have the employee, not the government, be the target of suits, ensuring the attorney levying the charges can pursue a financial outcome more realistic to the accused’s ability to pay.

Also, it should not be out of the question to require, as a part of employment, lawmakers, managers and high-level employees to hold a personal insurance policy related to harassment or contribute weekly to a defined Employment Practices Liability Insurance plan specific to their specific office or public entity.  Those policies would protect the taxpayers.

The state needs to go back to the drawing board and add some teeth – these ideas and others -- to their well-intentioned attempt to protect taxpayers. If not, the protections afforded now will still allow the bad seeds of the world to get off Scot free while you and I as taxpayers won’t.  

From the 09 September 2019 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News

Unfunded mandates: New York’s license to tax

As someone who regularly touts the importance of civic engagement I admire the social media and letter-writing campaigns of the incredible number of New Yorkers upset with Governor Cuomo’s plan to have our license plates replaced with new ones for a fee of $25. There’s enough pressure from the citizens that maybe it can be turned back. You never know.

While I dig the angry and active efforts of the citizenry I’m not too fond of the same by elected officials of Republican bent who are capitalizing on it from a political standpoint. They are fomenting and using the aggression as a weapon against Cuomo more than against the license plate plan. They don’t care that you’ll be out $25, they care about making their adversary look like a buffoon.

My suggestion to those officials and their constituents following them lock-step is the same as it has always been: Attack the policies, not the man.  And, while you’re at it, attack the policies of that man and countless more before him, regardless of party, who instituted far more egregious plans than that of a once-in-a-blue-moon license plate charge.

All of the action, all of this desire to make things right is better spent – and is never spent -- addressing the real issues. Specifically, I’m talking about New York’s long-standing habit of creating and maintaining unfunded mandates.

Why get mad about $25 that you might not have to throw away again for another decade when those repeating mandates cost you as a homeowner literally hundreds if not thousands of dollars each and every year?

I really can’t remember ever hearing an angry mob upset over them. Yet, they should be!

The state will too often introduce grandiose ideas and not have funding available and/or not pursue statewide initiatives to make it available (that is, spreading and sharing the pain with a higher state sales and income taxes). They claim to show leadership yet wipe their hands of the mess they’ve created and pass it on to others. Implementation and/or financing is imposed upon the counties and school districts, something that does not happen in most states. The counties then have to acquire the revenues from sales taxes and property taxes while the schools drive up their property tax levies.

That is why New Yorkers pay so much more to keep their homes than do people elsewhere. I often cite this example: One of my coworkers pays nearly $7,000 a year in property and school taxes on his home in Niagara County while, in comparison, one of our clients has a nearly-identical home in Tennessee where his bill is around $700 a year.

That sort of differential happens when there are more than 40 state defined and controlled programs funded by the counties that include Medicaid, public assistance for adults and families, child welfare, indigent criminal defense legal service, preschool special education and early-2000s pension sweeteners.

Nearly 80% of county budgets address state and federal unfunded mandates. For 9 major state programs alone, the state’s counties and New York City collect and contribute $12 billion annually to the Albany’s coffers. 

Of them, Medicaid is especially damaging to local budgets and your tax bill. In 1966, property taxes contributed $112 million to state Medicaid funding. This year it’s $7.5 billion. It’s been said that if the state fully funded – and better managed -- its Medicaid obligation homeowners would see their property tax bills cut by 54 to 62%.

School districts accumulate just as many mandates over the course of every several years, whether it’s new training, testing, standardization, reporting, or planning. Education officials will tell you that unfunded state mandates by themselves (not counting federal edicts) make up 16% of the school tax bill.   

With some mandates the state will placate the counties by shuffling money. Like a fixed card game or pyramid scheme, the state will take money from the counties and then send it back in part to pay for some state-mandated initiatives. But, that’s a losing battle: In 2001, the state reimbursed the counties at a rate of 16%; today, that number is 10%.

Realize, too, that not only are you throwing hundreds of dollars at the state every year but with the tax cap in place counties have to cut your local services (roads, bridges, parks, and police) in order to hold up their end of the bargain to the state.

How do we rectify this?

Beyond reforming the funding of existing programs, a start would be to stop the bleeding and make sure nothing more happens.

In every legislative session in recent years bills have been introduced that would ban future state mandates that increase costs on local governments and school districts without providing state funding to pay for delivering the required programs and services.

That’s the way it should have always been. If state officials want to do things, they need to find the way to make it happen, instead of finding scapegoats – the counties, the schools, and, ultimately, the homeowners.

So, I encourage you to get mad about all this and demand change.

Sure, the fireworks over license plates are awesome but there should be more – a lot more – when it comes to unfunded mandates.

$25 once versus $2,500 every year?

Given that perspective, it should be easy to choose your battles and just as easy to get people to join you in the fray.

From the 02 September 2019 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News

In defense of GMOs

If anyone dare bring up any reservations about anthropogenic global warming or express concerns over possible side effects of vaccines they are castigated for not knowing or believing in science.

Somehow, those who most often point the accusatory fingers are most often those who themselves don’t believe in science, specifically the value of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).

The deniers are everywhere.

For purely unscientific reasons (saying GMOs are the causes of everything from environmental mutations to lower intelligence) they forced the federal government’s hand in mandating labeling of GM foodstuff and still to this day constantly batter and demean the ag industry’s players who use GMO.  

It’s truly unfortunate because, in almost all cases, GMOs have proven to be a Godsend (or more accurately “Mansend”) for humanity and the environment. 

GMO crops are in almost everything. Genetic modification accounts for 95% of the soy bean output and 88% of the corn planted in the United State.

Their use has allowed for much higher yields (a 20% increase in global efficiency in just 20 years), larger and better looking fruits and vegetables, and a longer useful life for produce after harvest.

Those agricultural victories are an absolute necessity for human nourishment. Today, there are 795 million starving people on this planet. In the US alone, 1 in 10 Americans is deemed food insecure. Without GMOs cutting deeply into those sad numbers every year and bringing people out of starvation, where would we be in 2050 when the global population is projected to be 21% greater than it is now (9.3 billion versus 7.7 billion)?

Those people being nourished are also benefiting from advances brought about through genetic modification of crops. Consider that 250 million children in developing countries are subjected to Vitamin A deficiencies that lead to blindness among other ailments. Golden Rice, which is infused with bate-carotene, was produced to combat that. Millions of people have been saved by this GMO.

The anti-GMO crowd would like everyone to believe that GMOs are a scourge to the environment and a cause of global warming (what isn’t nowadays?).

They are anything but.

GMOs have reduced pesticide use by 37%. They allow the use of no-till farming which decreases erosion by 1 billion tons per year in the US, which also substantially decreases nitrogen and phosphorous runoff from farms. That same farming procedure also eliminates greenhouse gases: since 2015 American farmers have cut back on what is equivalent to 12 million cars off the road. 

The GMO witch hunt has to stop. It benefits no one to put the fear of GMOs into consumers who already can’t make smart food choices as it is -- more than two-thirds of US adults are overweight or obese, an outcome of choosing processed foods over produce, a situation that will be compounded by the war on fresh foods that might happen to have GMO origin.

Adding to that, your average consumer is incapable of telling good science from bad.

We need to leave that to the scientists to take care of.

In almost all cases, those bioengineers, nutritionists, and agriculturalists have done such great work that they cannot distinguish between GMOs and non-GMOs. And, neither can your body.

GMOs are safe, productive and the key to a brighter tomorrow for so many of this world’s hungry citizens.

From the 26 August 2019 Greater Niagara Newspapers and Batavia Daily News