August 31st, 2009

By Jeremiah Horrigan

Times Herald-Record

August 31, 2009 2:00 AM

NEW PALTZ — What do former Governor Mario Cuomo, state Sen. John Bonacic and a majority of New York state voters have in common?

They’re all in favor — in their various ways — of legislation that would lay tracks for a state constitutional convention.

Such legislation has already been proposed. Fueled in large part by the clownish behavior of state senators during last spring’s legislative “coup,” the cry for reform is being heard and acted on by a large cast of political power brokers and organizations not known for their collegiality, according to Gerald Benjamin.

Benjamin, a professor of political science at SUNY New Paltz, was a key figure in the state’s last — unsuccessful — attempt to get voters to approve convening a constitutional convention, in 1997.

Benjamin said there have been informal meetings across the state among various good-government groups as well as academics, scholars and various conservative and liberal think tanks.

With the recent release of a Quinnipiac University poll showing more than three-quarters of voters saying state government is dysfunctional and 64 percent favoring a convention, proponents of such a move can argue that the time is ripe for reform.

Benjamin, writing recently in an op-ed piece with Mario Cuomo in The Wall Street Journal, described the (state) Senate as “not dysfunctional — it is nonfunctional.”

One of the more unlikely advocates of a convention is also a member of that functionally challenged group — Bonacic, a Republican from Mount Hope.

“There are simply not enough independent thinkers in the state Legislature,” Bonacic said. “A constitutional convention could force major changes and hold officials more accountable.

It could end the culture of the leadership controlling the debate which has strangled too many good ideas in Albany,”

Blair Horner, legislative director of the New York State Pubic Interest Research Group, said his group is “keenly interested” in a convention, but not before the issue of delegate selection is resolved so that legislators and their campaigns don’t dominate an eventual convention.

“We’re interested in there being a real people’s convention — not one that’s more of the same,” Horner said.