Andrew Cuomo (AP)
ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo yesterday suggested New York’s biggest state employee union could be buying votes by freezing campaign contributions to lawmakers who supported a bill cutting pension benefits for future government workers.
“If you are linking political contributions to a specific vote, you may get a call from the attorney general or the district attorney or JCOPE” — the state’s new ethics enforcement agency, said Cuomo.
“There should be no campaign contributions for specific votes,” Cuomo — a former attorney general who warred with labor unions this month over his Tier VI pension proposal — added during an appearance on Albany’s Talk 1300 AM radio.
Civil Service Employees Association president Danny Donohue said he suspended all political contributions and endorsements on Monday as “a direct result of the political deal between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state legislative leadership, Senate Republicans and Assembly Democrats, trading the future retirement security of working New Yorkers for legislative redistricting lines.”
Asked if Donohue’s move amounted to buying votes — a practice prohibited by state law — Cuomo said, “That’s exactly right.”
CSEA didn’t sound worried.
“Consistency doesn’t seem to be Governor Cuomo’s strong suit,” said union spokesman Stephen Madarasz.
He noted Cuomo’s praise for Mayor Bloomberg, who essentially promised last month to support candidates who backed the governor’s pension plan.
Meanwhile, two Republican state senators told union lobbyists this week that they had no choice but to vote for the pension deal, which the Legislature approved last week.
An attendee at the AFL-CIO’s weekly meeting of labor lobbyists said Sens. Martin Golden of Brooklyn and Joseph Robach of Rochester explained their votes by saying that “the train was already headed down the tracks and couldn’t be stopped.”
Golden and Robach told the umbrella labor group’s lobbyists that it was “something they had to do,” said the attendee, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The source said the senators’ unspoken implication was that they had to provide Senate Majority Dean Skelos (R-LI) with their votes for pension Tier VI in exchange for Cuomo’s approval of the Senate’s and Assembly’s redistricting plan.
Republicans hold a bare majority of 32 seats in the 62-seat Senate and needed every GOP vote to pass Tier VI.
The two senators claimed “they tried their best and got what they could” to soften the final Tier VI deal, the source said.
Cuomo estimates the deal will save $80 billion over 30 years, but he had proposed a tougher, $113 billion savings plan.
Neither senator returned calls for comment yesterday. AFL-CIO spokesman Ryan Delgado would not comment, calling the meeting internal.