Today’s Times Union has an editorial commending New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli for calling on the legislature to pass public financing of elections.

Click here for the editorial.

Here’s the text:

Mr. DiNapoli’s case for reform

First published: Monday, June 8, 2009

It’s hard to imagine state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli in much trouble when he’s up for election next year. He’ll be an incumbent who’s steered clear, so far, of scandal or other political trouble, running for a lower-level statewide office in a state where his fellow Democrats have an overwhelming enrollment advantage.

The Republicans, meanwhile, are likely to have their sights set, and resources focused, on higher offices held by more potentially vulnerable incumbents, such as Gov. David Paterson or Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

All that makes Mr. DiNapoli the perfect poster boy for the cause he’s embraced for some time now, namely public campaign financing and other reform measures. He wants to make the 2010 comptroller’s race a test case of sorts for how campaign spending can he held to reasonable levels.

The spending limits Mr. DiNapoli is proposing — $5 million in each party’s primary, and $7.5 million per candidate in the general election — are actually on the high side of reasonable. Mr. DiNapoli’s predecessor, the disgraced Alan Hevesi, spent only about $4.5 million in a re-election campaign in 2006 that didn’t become close until its final weeks, after the various scandals of his tenure began to unravel.

Still, in the anything goes campaign environment of New York, Mr. DiNapoli’s proposal is a promising start. If ever there was an office where campaign contributors seem to be looking for something in return, it’s this one.

The comptroller is the sole trustee of the state employees pension fund, and the ongoing scandals of the Hevesi era have come to feature people who wanted in on the business of investing what’s still a $110 billion fund. Campaign finance reform best begins right here.

It’s encouraging, too, that Mr. DiNapoli wants to make the comptroller’s race the first election for state office where public financing is available. The way to campaign finance reform in New York, to the end of elections where incumbents have such lopsided advantages over their challengers, is to pay for campaigns with public funds rather than private donations.

New Yorkers willing to have their money spent on other people’s political endeavors might be wary, of course, about just where those funds actually go. Examples of frivolous, often outrageous, use of campaign contributions are everywhere in New York. Mr. DiNapoli only needed to consider one for the issue to hit home. It involves, who else, Mr. Hevesi.

The former comptroller spent more than $750,000 in campaign funds in 2006 to pay criminal defense lawyers trying to fend off an investigation that soon drove him out of office.

The bill Mr. DiNapoli is pushing fixes such glaring loopholes. This is genuine reform, and it should be embraced wholeheartedly — for all elections, too, not just the comptroller’s race.

The issue:

The state comptroller wants to make his next election a test of new campaign finance laws.

The Stakes:

Public funding, in all elections, is the best way to counter the spending by special interests.

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