Plastics Bill Died in Assembly After Blitz By Lobbyists With Ties to Heastie

“I’m a ‘yes’ on the bill,” Heastie told reporters last Tuesday, three days before the end of the legislative session. “But you need 76 ‘yeses’ to pass a bill, and we don’t have that.”

Environmental advocates slammed Heastie for not bringing the bill to a vote. 

“I am disappointed that the bill has sat on the Assembly floor since January,” said Judith Enck, president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics who has pushed for the bill. “There was intense special interest lobbying against the bill, and supporters of the bill were outgunned and outspent.”

At least three lobbyists who oppose the bill have close ties to the speaker. 

In late May, Rebecca Lamorte, a lobbyist who has been romantically involved with Heastie, lambasted the bill at a rally she hosted. The lobbying firm where she works, Brown and Weinraub, represents numerous chemical industry and other clients opposed to the bill, and actively lobbied Albany for at least two of them this year. 

“I woke up with a song on my heart (sic), and I hope you’ll join me in singing it,” Lamorte said at the rally. “Don’t pass PRRIA.”

Lamorte is not among the lobbyists listed as working for those clients in the firm’s lobbying filings. Neither Lamorte nor Brown and Weinraub responded to requests for comment. Heastie had adopted a recusal policy limiting his interactions with Lamorte’s previous employer and his involvement on its legislative priorities, but his office did not respond when asked if he had adopted a similar policy for Brown and Weinraub.

Patrick Jenkins, one of the speaker’s campaign advisers, also directly lobbied him against the bill, and Heastie’s former top aide lobbied his staff.

Heastie did not respond to questions about whether he had adopted any conflict-of-interest policy that could have impacted his own decision-making on the legislation. Under state law, New York officials may not have any interest that is in “substantial conflict” with their public service.

The packaging bill sought to decrease single-use packaging by 30 percent over 12 years; charge companies for those materials; and ban the use of suspected cancer-causing chemicals in the manufacturing of plastic. The money generated from the fees would have gone toward supporting municipal recycling infrastructure across the state.

The chemical industry has pushed for so-called advanced or chemical recycling to count toward companies’ reductions. Those technologies use heat and solvents to break plastics down into fuel and other plastics. Environmental advocates generally oppose chemical recycling because it creates hazardous waste and other pollutants.

Industry lobbyists also argue that the bill would increase costs that would be passed on to consumers, while advocates say it would shift waste collection costs from consumers to manufacturers.

This is the third year in a row that Heastie did not bring the bill to a vote. In the last two legislative sessions, it passed the Senate but did not make it out of the Assembly. 

This year’s delayed budget gave lawmakers just a few days to pass non-budget bills. As a result, the Senate chose not to vote on the bill either, in part because Senate leaders didn’t want to spend time on a bill that wouldn’t pass the Assembly, according to one Senate staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

The developments reflect Albany’s well-established culture of secrecy. Heastie allowed his members to avoid taking a potentially controversial vote, keeping any concerns about the legislation from becoming public three weeks ahead of Assembly primary elections.

Standing before the Capitol’s Million Dollar Staircase, Lamorte opened the event by calling the bill “an unaffordable, job-killing piece of legislation.”

During the first four months of this year, lobbying records show that Lamorte’s employer, Brown and Weinraub, directly lobbied Heastie’s staff on the plastics bill on behalf of two clients who opposed it: The American Beverage Association and Eastman Chemical Company. Brown and Weinraub also reported that it was “monitoring” the bill on behalf of Croplife America, Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment, and Syngenta Crop Protection.

After Heastie and Lamorte began dating several years ago, his office was said to have formulated a policy outlining how to handle potential conflicts of interest posed by the relationship. Heastie’s office never released that recusal policy or publicly disclosed the relationship. But a copy of a letter obtained by New York Focus said such a policy had been “communicated to relevant senior staff in late 2023.” 

The memo, written by Heastie’s government counsel, stated the speaker would not meet with officials from the organization where Lamorte worked at the time — a New York City-based labor-employers partnership — or related labor entities. In addition, it barred him from making decisions on government matters “specific or unique to such organizations.” On those issues, senior Assembly staff would come to and advance a “consensus decision” to the speaker.

Neither Heastie’s office nor Lamorte responded to questions about the current status of their relationship, but each have separately been seen around the Capitol complex and in social media photos walking the same dog, a Golden Doodle named Paisley, including during the recent legislative session.

In June 2024, Lamorte was laid off from the labor-employers group — a move that caused Heastie to place an upset phone call to her former employer.

Lamorte was quickly hired by Brown and Weinraub, one of Albany’s top lobbying firms. It’s not clear if Heastie’s office ever adopted a similar recusal policy concerning Lamorte’s new position, or if Brown and Weinraub’s representation of clients deeply opposed to the bill would have limited Heastie’s involvement.

Heastie’s romantic relationship with a lobbyist actively involved with legislation he wields considerable power over warrants a recusal policy, said Rachael Fauss, a senior policy adviser at the government reform group Reinvent Albany.

“If anything,” Fauss said, “her current employer, Brown and Weinraub, has even more entanglements with the New York State Assembly than her prior employer.”

Lamorte is not Brown and Weinraub’s only connection to Heastie. Its roster also includes former top Heastie aide LouAnn Ciccone, who reported lobbying Heastie’s staff concerning the bill on behalf of the American Beverage Association. Different lobbyists at the firm reported lobbying Heastie’s staff for Eastman Chemical.

Heastie’s campaign adviser, close friend, and former college roommate, Patrick Jenkins, was also involved with the opposition. Jenkins and members of his firm, Patrick B. Jenkins and Associates, disclosed lobbying on the bill earlier this year for the American Chemistry Council, a group staunchly opposed to the bill whose members include Dow, DuPont, 3M, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other major corporations, as well as the EPR Leadership Forum. For those clients, Jenkins’s firm disclosed specifically lobbying the speaker’s staff — as well as Heastie personally.

Jenkins told New York Focus that he “couldn’t convince [Heastie] that it was a bad bill” but was “successful at convincing many members that it was a bad bill.”

“In every meeting I had, not just with the speaker, but every meeting, people explained why the bill, as constructed, as composed, was not a good bill for them,” Jenkins said, stating that there were more than 40 Democratic members who told his clients that they wouldn’t support the bill.

The American Chemistry Council has spent millions of dollars lobbying against the plastics bill. Last fall, it facilitated visits for lawmakers to tour advanced recycling plants in Atlanta, Jenkins said. The American Chemistry Council did not pay for the lawmakers’ trips, he said. He declined to specify whether he or his lobbying firm played a role in facilitating the trips or to say which lawmakers attended. New York lobbyists for the Chemistry Council accompanied lawmakers on visits to a North Carolina chemical recycling plant in recent years.

The American Chemistry Council did not answer direct questions about the trips, but said in a statement, “New York’s PRRIA was an anti-plastic NGO wish list aimed at ending the use of plastic rather than responsibly managing packaging.”

While there’s no law preventing lawmakers’ personal associates or friends from lobbying them directly, good government groups have long supported a ban on campaign consultants lobbying their own campaign clients, a prohibition that if enacted, would have prevented Jenkins, who has received payments from Heastie’s campaign beginning in 2009 and as recently as May, from lobbying the speaker. 

Their concern is potentially turning “political relationships into financial gain,” according to Ben Weinberg, director of public policy at Citizens Union. Legislation barring lobbyists from serving as political consultants passed the Senate last decade, but died in the Assembly, before Heastie became speaker.

Jenkins has also served as a campaign consultant for some rank-and-file Assembly members, some of whom went lengthy periods without paying his firm.