This doesn’t seem fair: Not only do state taxpayers have to pay disgraced ex- Comptroller Alan Hevesi’s room and board for the next 1-to-4 years — they’ve still got to pay his pension, too.
That is, even as the twice-convicted felon pockets pennies a day for stamping license plates upstate, he’ll still be drawing a whopping $105,000-a-year payout.
Which is why it’s such good news that Gov. Cuomo unveiled a bill Tuesday to end the practice.
“It is long past time that we learned the lessons of the Hevesi case and made permanent changes to our system that will stop [such] corruption,” Cuomo said.
Nearly a dozen convicted former lawmakers are in the same circumstance, netting big checks while behind bars.
And even if alleged criminals like state Sen. Carl Kruger and former Sen. Pedro Espada are convicted by juries of their peers, those same peers will still have to pay taxes to support their retirement.
Their pensions are protected by the state Constitution — so only newly elected officials will be subject to the law Cuomo proposes.
What better reason, then, to pass it quickly?
Hevesi, then the sole trustee of the state’s multibillion-dollar employee pension fund, used his position to steer $250 million in pension-fund investments to a crony in exchange for $1 million in illegal bribes and considerations.
In a perverse way, that makes him a tri ple-dipper — drawing a pension, squeezing prison budgets and violating the public trust in the first place.
Think of Cuomo’s proposal as “Alan’s Law.”
The Legislature needs to pass it without delay.