Reporters’ Notebook: Green Funding Feint, Foundation Aid Update, and Lobbying Fines

The Reporters’ Notebook features bite-sized stories and updates from New York Focus reporters on the topics they cover. It’s our way of keeping readers updated about the subjects they care about between the time it takes to publish our longer, more in-depth articles.

Jump to: Lobbying | Climate Funding | Foundation Aid

Prominent New York Lobbying Firm Racks Up Fines

Over four years, a prominent New York lobbying firm missed disclosure deadlines more than 230 times — and paid more than $123,000 in late fees.

The firm, Patrick B. Jenkins and Associates, paid by far the most late fees of any firm in the state in 2022 and 2023, and accumulated more fees last year, according to records obtained by New York Focus.

Jenkins is a close friend of Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie — they were college roommates — and one of his key political advisers. After Heastie became speaker in 2015, Jenkins’s client list exploded. According to annual reports from the state Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government, in 2014, Jenkins’s firm had eight clients; by 2023, the list had swelled to 48.

Every two months, lobbying firms must file reports that provide insight into each public official and issue they’re seeking to influence on behalf of each of their clients. If filings are submitted late, the public can’t access this information in a timely manner.

Over the past four years, Jenkins and Associates has filed 40 reports that were at least 100 days late, according to data from the ethics commission.

At first, state ethics regulators were willing to cut some slack.

In 2021, the firm’s senior vice president and general counsel, Dwayne Andrews, applied for waivers to substantially reduce $16,000 in late fees the firm owed at the time. In his requests, Andrews wrote that Covid had caused internal issues, but that the firm had “implemented new checks and balances to ensure this does not happen again.” In February 2022, the Joint Commission on Public Ethics — the predecessor to the state’s current ethics oversight body — reduced the late fees by about $4,000.

Since those waivers were granted, however, the firm has submitted 158 late filings and paid more than $86,000 in fees. Neither Andrews nor Jenkins responded to a request for comment.

Another politically connected firm, Albany-based Bolton-St. Johns, is among the most penalized lobbyists. In 2021, the firm was assessed about $130,000 in fees for more than 400 late filings and ended up paying $97,000 through a settlement. At the time, the firm called the issue an “outlier” caused by Covid and other factors.

Bolton was assessed about $13,000 more in 2022 — the third highest late fee of any lobbying firm that year — and about $6,000 — the sixth highest — the following year, according to ethics commission annual reports.

Records showing 2024’s top late fee payers are not yet available. —Chris Bragg

Hochul’s Green Funding Feint

When Governor Kathy Hochul unexpectedly hit the brakes on her signature climate funding program last week, she promised an alternative: a down payment of $1 billion on the state’s green transition. She touted it as a faster injection of cash than the promised “cap and invest” program, which likely wouldn’t have started collecting revenue from polluters until at least this fall.

“So we’re actually accelerating our growth toward a renewable and clean energy environment,” Hochul told reporters on Tuesday.

That may not be entirely true. Hochul’s proposed budget does contain a fresh $1 billion pot of climate funding, dubbed the “Sustainable Future Program.” But the state would have five years to spend that money, her office confirmed to New York Focus. That’s an average of $200 million a year.

That’s less than a tenth of the $3 billion that cap and invest was supposed to raise from polluters each year; two-thirds of that money would have gone to climate initiatives, and the rest directly back to New Yorkers as rebates. California raised close to $1 billion from its cap and trade system in just the last quarter; Washington state, nearly $300 million. Hochul’s proposed backstop looks small by comparison.

Climate hawks are fuming. Progressive lawmakers and activists from the NY Renews coalition rallied in the Capitol on Wednesday, calling on the legislature to push an ambitious version of cap and invest — and a slate of other climate justice policies — through the budget. Earlier in the week, three environmental justice advocates quit the state’s Climate Justice Working Group over “the Governor’s backpedaling and her lack of vision, commitment, and focus,” they wrote in an open letter.

“We are resigning because we, sadly, no longer see a path forward working with a Governor who fails to center the health and priorities of environmental and climate justice communities and falters to do hard, but right things for our communities,” they wrote. “This climate justice failure rests squarely with the Governor.” —Colin Kinniburgh