Klein Proposes Own Ethics Bill, Toughens Nepotism Statute
As the Senate is set tomorrow to take up new ethics reform, Senate Deputy Majority Leader Jeff Klein, D-Bronx, is putting out his own ethics bill—and it includes a stronger prohibition of lawmakers hiring relatives
to legislative jobs.
The bill would also ban legislators from serving on a new Legislative Ethics Commission. The measure would require legislative leaders to appoint non-lawmakers to the panel.
Under the proposal that passed the Assembly and being considered tomorrow by the Senate, four legislators would serve on the eight-member panel that would oversee legislative ethics.
“I do not think elected officials should be on,” Klein said. “I think it’s very difficult and doesn’t make a lot of sense to have fellow legislators standing in judgment of their colleagues.”
In the wake of criticism last month that fellow Democratic Sen. Pedro Espada’s son was hired to a $120,000 job in the Senate, Klein’s bill would crack down on nepotism by lawmakers, saying that legislators would be barred “from having any knowledge of such hire or helping to process the paperwork for such hire in any way for relatives in the same legislative chamber.”
Klein said that “When you’re an elected official, you just have to have different standards.”
Espada’s son resigned from the position soon after it became public. Klein and Espada have had their issues in the past, even reportedly almost coming to blows when they were in the midst of the Senate coup in June.
Here’s the nepotism bill:
| 
Email This
Advertisements
Members of ethics committees should be elected, not appointed. No matter what we pay them, it would be worth the price to have them answerable to the public, not the politicians.
Ethics? Jeff Klein? This surely has to be the end by product of a poll he recently done that shows his weak point is corruption and ethics…
The same man who sold out his own neighborhood in the Bronx by making a deal with Jose Rivera for his old Assembly seat now wants to fight nepotism? Where was this passion when he made a deal with Jose that the party would back his first senate run in exchange for Noami Rivera (the worst elected official ever)?
How about reforming campaign finance? Oh no…maybe then you wouldn’t be able to rack up giant bills up in Albany at all the fancy steak houses?
How about supporting public financing? Can’t have that…cause then surely someone will beat him and he’d be stuck being a mediocre attorney for the rest of his life…