New York corruption

When Will It End? Much Work Is Left as Albany Session Winds Down

By SUSANNE CRAIG, JESSE McKINLEY and THOMAS KAPLANJUNE

It was to be the last day of the legislative session, so tensions on Wednesday were understandably high on the Senate floor. With so much to be done, things had come to a standstill over an unexpectedly provocative bill: naming the wood frog as the official state amphibian.

“This is an asinine bill,” said Senator Michael N. Gianaris, a Queens Democrat. “We’re sitting here discussing what should be the official amphibian when two million people in New York City are not sure if they have a home.”

Senator John A. DeFrancisco, a Syracuse Republican who sponsored the bill, took umbrage at that line of criticism, saying that to compare the wood frog bill to rent legislation was “complete nonsense.”

As the debate raged, Senator Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat, took to Twitter to continue her argument: “Though I honor the wood frog, millions of desperately worried people who risk losing their homes are wondering why we’re discussing it now.”

So it went in Albany, as the legislative session that everyone wants to end simply will not.

Although the session was scheduled to end on Wednesday, lawmakers were taking bets on how long it would be extended, and hedges were being made: Hotels were quickly being booked.

The leaders of the Assembly and the Senate met separately behind closed doors with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo; they make up Albany’s so-called three men in a room. The two legislative leaders also met, behind closed doors, with the members of their respective conferences. One thing was consistent: The meetings ended with little to report.

Throughout the day, lawmakers spent hours passing bills and asking aloud when it would all end. By dusk, politicians here had still not resolved numerous matters affecting millions of New Yorkers, including tenants, schoolchildren and mass transit riders. (Fear not, wood frog fans — that bill passed.)

There is always a carnival aspect to the end of session, but this year was different. The longtime leaders of the Assembly and the Senate, Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, and Dean G. Skelos, a Republican, were arrested on federal corruption charges and stepped down from their leadership positions. Mr. Skelos’s putative successor, Senator Thomas W. Libous, could not move up: He is facing his own federal indictment and has cancer.

There were other matters that distracted from the order of business. On New Year’s Day, Mr. Cuomo learned after delivering a speech in Buffalo that his father, Mario M. Cuomo, had died. The governor’s partner, Sandra Lee, the food personality, was found to have breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy last month. And a recent prison break has drawn Mr. Cuomo twice to the North Country.

David Langdon, a lobbyist who has been a fixture in Albany since the early 1970s, warned about trying to draw comparisons between this session and previous ones. “There is just no parallel for this year, there really isn’t,” he said, standing in the Senate lobby.

With the arrests of Mr. Silver and Mr. Skelos, the governor had to navigate negotiations with two new players, Carl E. Heastie, the new Assembly speaker, and John J. Flanagan, who took over from Mr. Skelos.

Those arrests also had a chilling effect in Albany, as lawmakers and lobbyists were concerned about whether they were being recorded by investigators from the office of the United States attorney for the Southern District, Preet Bharara.

For some, the day began just after 8 a.m., as Mr. Cuomo’s senior staff members began pulling into their parking spots outside the governor’s office in the Capitol. A truck with a giant sandwich board on it slowly circled the building, imploring the governor to “End Cash Bail Now!” The truck’s sponsor, the Pretrial Justice Institute, says cash bail puts poor defendants at a disadvantage.

On the second floor, outside the governor’s office, teachers’ unions — consistently one of Mr. Cuomo’s biggest political targets this session — were asking lawmakers not to increase the number of charter schools allowed. They did so in a photo-ready fashion, unrolling a 160-foot-long petition on the Capitol floor.

Many lawmakers seemed resigned to a long day, using jokes and asides as a way to break the grueling monotony of passing many largely administrative bills. Early in the day, for example, the Assembly dealt with a variety of aquatic-themed legislation, including bills to extend the regulatory authority of the Department of Environmental Conservation over conch, whelk, scup and flounder.

“We have a whole school of these bills,” joked Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, a Democrat whose district includes the East Village.

Daniel J. O’Donnell, a Manhattan Democrat and the chairman of the Assembly’s Correction Committee, hopped over the teachers’ union petition before discussing the prison break in Dannemora, N.Y., and the continuing search for two escaped inmates.

Mr. O’Donnell, who had visited the Clinton Correctional Facility, where the inmates had been held, was not pleased with the governor’s approach to the breakout, which involved news conferences at the prison and multiple television interviews.

“We need a governor who behaves like a governor,” Mr. O’Donnell said, before attending a hallway rally for new action on rent regulations. “Not like the Warden of the North.”

Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the governor, called the assemblyman’s criticism “willfully disingenuous and silly” and defended Mr. Cuomo’s actions after the prison break. “He’s a hands-on governor in everything he does,” Mr. Azzopardi said.

In the more sedate environs of the Senate, which is separated from the Assembly by a long hallway, Senator Rubén Díaz Sr., a Bronx Democrat, said he was fed up with the way Albany was run, and had seen no change since the arrests of Mr. Skelos and Mr. Silver.

“I am disappointed because we are here to work and we end up waiting for these three guys in a room to tell us what to do,” Mr. Díaz said, wearing a brown cowboy hat. “It is just wrong. Blah blah blah, that is all we seem to do around here.”

Taxpayers, he noted, end up footing the bill for it all, paying him and other lawmakers a per diem of $172 for each day they are in Albany.

Senator George A. Amedore Jr., a freshman Republican from the Albany area, said he felt the session had gone “pretty smooth.” Still, he said, he felt it was “in the best interest of New Yorkers for the Legislature to be out of session as fast as possible,” if only so as to not pass “more laws, more regulations or potentially more taxation.”

Other senators said they actually wanted the session to continue past Wednesday. Senator David Carlucci, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Rockland County, said he hoped to pass a bill he sponsored establishing a monitor to oversee the East Ramapo School District, which has been the subject of controversy. The bill, however, needs to age three days, per the State Constitution, and so cannot be voted on until Friday, when lawmakers, in theory, should have left Albany for the year.

“It’s one of the few times,” he said, “that I’m happy session hasn’t ended.”

During an Assembly vote, Mr. Silver, who seems to have settled into his role as a rank-and-file member of the caucus, moved around the Assembly floor. “At some point,” he said, with a note of been there, done that, “the logjam will break.”