Few things the Legislature did last session grabbed more attention than its attempt to bring meaningful campaign finance reform to New York. By session's end, however, few attempts at reform failed as completely as the one on campaign finance.

 Observers expect another round of futility when lawmakers again tackle the issue upon their return to Albany in January.

 During the 1996 session, Sen. Michael Hoblock Jr., an Albany Republican, and Assemblywoman Sandra Galef, a Westchester Democrat, carved out similar bills requiring the state Board of Elections to computerize its disclosure records, a measure widely viewed as basic but important reform. Their bills didn't eliminate a legislator's ability to suck up thousands in political action committee (PAC) dollars. They didn't rein in contributions from labor unions. All they did was create a system that would better allow the public to discover who was giving what to whom, and how much. "This is not an issue, in my opinion, of campaign finance reform," Hoblock says of the failed proposal, "because all this bill does is make more readily accessible information that already is available."

 Government watchdog groups long have argued that computerized disclosure curbs contribution abuses. A Gannett Newspapers series earlier in the year showed that businesses regularly circumvented the state's $5,000 limit on total corporate giving, but, as access to records was difficult without the availability of computers, the public was unaware of the excesses.

 For a while, it appeared that Hoblock and Galef would get their bills passed. Galef's had support in the Assembly, which each year typically forwards its version of a campaign finance reform proposal to the Senate, where it dies a quiet death. But Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, a Brunswick Republican, intervened with his own campaign disclosure proposal in his chamber. He incorporated the computerized records provision, but he also called for labor unions to be treated as corporations, establishing for them the same $5,000 a year aggregate contribution limit. Why deal with the minutiae of disclosure and reform instead of taking a wholesale approach, Bruno asks, referring to his proposal. "My attitude has been with my colleagues, 'Why pretend you're fixing something when you're not?'" Bruno says.

 By tightening the reins on unions, which typically bolster the Assembly's campaign coffers, Bruno effectively signaled the death knell for campaign finance reform in 1996. His proposal was dead on arrival in the Assembly.

 Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver of Manhattan says Bruno "obviously attempted to look like a reformer," but that he clearly knew his proposal was doomed to fail. "The poison pill was that [the Republicans] were going to make it more difficult for labor unions to contribute to campaigns," adds Blair Horner, legislative director of the NPW York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), a longtime advocate for campaign finance reform. "If you really want to do computerization, you do computerization," Horner says. "If you want to do campaign finance reform, you do campaign finance reform."

 Says Galef, "The bill pretty much got sabotaged.... If you can't get the easy one done, how can you ever get the other ones done?"

 The "other ones" include curbing special interest fundraisers—of which there were more than 170 in Albany alone during the past session, according to Common Cause of New York. "When it should [have been] devoted to getting a budget done on time, the Legislature instead devoted [itself] to getting money from lobbyists," says Andrew Greenblatt, Common Cause's executive director.

 In May, Common Cause, NYPIRG, the League of Women Voters and United We Stand America released an extensive report on the status of campaign finance reform in New York, which maintains that Albany lawmakers are under the thumb of the special interests that help pave—and pay—their way to electoral victories. "In short, campaign contributions, the life-blood of those seeking state elective office, originate with those most likely to seek special favors from those in office, particularly from legislative leadership," the report stated

 Among its findings:
 
 

• "Average New Yorkers" aren't the ones padding the coffers of state lawmakers. Though individuals can donate $2,800 to an Assembly candidate, $7,000 to a state Senate candidate and $1,000 to a congressional candidate in a general election, half the contributions between January 1993 and July l995 were doled out by corporations and corporate PACs. Another 12 percent came from labor unions and labor PACs.



• A handful of legislators are the biggest beneficiaries of corporate largess. In the Assembly, the top 20 contribution recipients tallied 43 percent of all donations to members of that house. In the Senate, the top 14 recipients took in almost 52 percent.



• Majority party legislators receive the lion's share of the money. Majority members, by a 3-to-1 ratio, raised more money than their minority party colleagues.

 Greenblatt says, "The fence between the moneyed interests and the politicians already [has] a number of holes in it. And every time we patch one hole, the politicians find another one."

 This year state GOP Chairman Bill Powers reminded prospective contributors in a letter that there were no limits on donations to a party's "housekeeping" account, originally created to help purchase items like coffee pots and other basic necessities for campaign headquarters. As Powers noted in one letter obtained by NYPIRG, donors "can write a $100,000 check" as long as they note it's for a housekeeping account.

 As one person's panacea is another person's poison, divisions in the legislative ranks over campaign finance reform run deep. "That's been the problem all along with campaign finance reform," Hoblock says. "Everybody has a different idea. I don't think there's one legislator that would not like to see some kind of reform because [raising money] is one of the most distasteful parts of running for office."

 There's been no shortage of proposals to grapple with campaign finance reform. Some have called for public financing incentives, which 22 states now have; some would improve restrictions on lobbyist contributions or fund-raisers during a session; some would limit how much money can be shifted from one candidate's war chest to another.

 Though NYPIRG and Common Cause both have pushed for public financing of campaigns, and the Assembly's annual campaign reform bill typically includes a measured form of public financing, the initiative in New York has gotten nowhere. Arguments by reformers that public financing is the only way to level the playing field and to reduce the power of special interests largely have fallen on deaf ears.

 Bruno maintains he is willing to consider public financing but expresses a certain wariness. "I think you have to be very careful . . . that you don't force people to support candidates against their will," he says.

 CHANGE-NY, a conservative anti-tax organization that helped elect Gov. George Pataki, sees public financing as "nothing more than welfare for politicians," says Brian Backstrom, a vice president with the organization. "You're taking money out of my pocket and giving it to someone who I dislike and distrust."

 But CHANGE-NY doesn't argue that extensive reforms are necessary and that state lawmakers tend to run and hide from any such proposals. "I think it's clear that the one area where the politicians in the Legislature tend to insulate themselves is when the specter of reform comes to their doorstep," Backstrom says.

 What's needed, he claims, are term limits to restrict a legislator from making a career out of the role and greater restrictions on franking, especially near election time.

 Nick Nyhart, director of the Money and Politics Project for the Northeast Citizen Action Resource Center, claims that activists in state after state have forced lawmakers to curb their appetites for special interest money In Maine, for instance, the cost of campaigning had skyrocketed to a degree that disgusted many. In 1994, Angus King spent more than $1.5 million in his successful gubernatorial bid. Only two decades before, it had cost $103,000 to win the seat. This year, however, Maine voters decide the fate of a campaign finance disclosure package which uses a formula based on the spending of past elections to give flat cash grants to candidates.

 While the Supreme Court has ruled that some restrictions on campaign spending are unconstitutional obstacles to free speech, most public financing proposals require candidates to voluntarily agree to spending caps and prohibitions on fund-raising. 

Greenblatt maintains that there is a growing public desire for campaign finance reform in New York that lawmakers will have to face. "There's no doubt that everybody's starting to feel the pressure that campaign finance reform is placing [on them]," he says.

 Silver says he will continue to push for some form of public financing. But until that happens, he will make use of current finance laws. "I do have to give my members the wherewithal to be competitive," he says.

 Most seasoned observers hold out little hope for reform. Pointing to the 1996 session and the failure to pass the computerization bill, they doubt New York's lawmakers really want to sever their umbilical cords to special interests. "The effectiveness of any [campaign finance regulation] depends on the effectiveness of disclosure," says Michael Malbin, a political science professor at the State University of New York at Albany who is analyzing the fall-out of reform proposals across the country. "The effectiveness of disclosure depends on adequate staffing and computerization. The bottom line is if they can't figure out how to pass a disclosure bill, they're not going to be able to pass much else."

 Gary Craig is a reporter for the Rochester Gannett newspapers.