No ‘Aberration'

Things are moving fast in respect of the Comptroller, Alan Hevesi. Attorney General Spitzer's decision to withdraw his endorsement and Governor Pataki's decision to name a prosecutor suggest that it's time for the comptroller to face up to the gravity of his situation. In the great debate on New York 1, he tried to skate, insisting that he "forgot" to reimburse the state for a state employee he used for three years to drive his ailing wife around and run errands. The way he characterized the failure to reimburse for use of the driver was as an "aberration."

The problem is precisely that it's not an aberration. The comptroller says the state employee was needed to provide "security" for his wife, but the employee had no security background or training and was unarmed. Mr. Hevesi said in the New York 1 debate that his action was an "aberration," but his career as comptroller of New York State has been rife with questionable ethics.

In the debate on New York 1, Mr. Hevesi lectured his Republican opponent about the state's policies on procurement and contracts. Yet Mr. Hevesi himself has been accepting campaign contributions by the hundreds of thousands of dollars from individuals associated with law firms who want to represent the state pension fund in shareholder lawsuits and from money-management firms that want to manage a share of the fund. And then he has turned around and awarded those same firms hugely lucrative legal assignments.

Attorney General Spitzer, who stuffed his campaign coffers with tort bar money, has announced a policy of not accepting campaign contributions from people with business before his office. Municipal bond underwriters have voluntarily imposed a regulation on themselves sharply restricting "pay to play" contributions. But Mr. Hevesi's highly sensitive ethical antennae don't seem to have sensed any problem here. Maybe he "forgot."

In any event, Mr. Hevesi's ethics are now such an embarrassment that no less a paragon of ethical behavior than Alfonse D'Amato actually had an opinion piece in yesterday's New York Post lacing into Mr. Hevesi's ethics. It would be humorous if it weren't our own state's government we are talking about, and if the ones paying the price for the unethical behavior weren't New York's already overburdened taxpayers. Mr. Hevesi doesn't seem to want to face up to all this, and it may yet fall to the voters to put an end to this sordid chapter in state politics.