Talk about a master class in “How They Do Things in Albany.”To keep a legislative pay increase but lose new restrictions on lawmakers’ outside income, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie is piggybacking onto a lawsuit by a conservative legal group that is seeking to overturn the raise. In case you haven’t been following at home: During budget negotiations last year, the New York Legislature created a committee composed of current and former state and New York City comptrollers to determine whether members of the Assembly and State Senate deserved a raise, their first in 21 years. In December, the committee recommended a $50,500 raise, to $130,000 by 2021, along with a provision that lawmakers’ outside income could not exceed 15 percent of their pay — an important ethical reform to avoid conflicts of interest. Mr. Heastie, and other legislators who objected to the outside income limits, immediately said the committee — whose recommendations automatically became law on Jan. 1 — had no legal right to do anything but decide on pay. Within days of the committee’s decision, the Government Justice Center, an Albany-based nonprofit, sued to overturn it, saying that only the Legislature could set pay, and that the panel had overstepped its statutory mandate by imposing outside pay limits .

Source: New York Times January 12, 2019 20:26 UTC