“Following intense negotiations between the bill's lead sponsors and the Governor's office, the LLC Transparency Act was signed into law in the 11th hour last week. Unlike the bill we passed, the Governor's amendment will not require the database of LLC beneficial owners to be publicly accessible. It will be available only to state and local governments. Still, this is a breakthrough step towards dismantling the anonymity of LLCs and the corruption that comes with it. New York is now the first state in the nation to sign something like this into law.

These negotiations tend to start with substantial watering down of bills, and the lead sponsor, Emily Gallagher, had to work hard to preserve the core integrity of the bill. She is one of the five DSA legislators in the Assembly along with me, and I will be joining her push for full transparency next.

The Governor also amended the bill’s implementation date to be two years from signing instead of one. That means the database will be created in 2026. Once created, our office will plan on assisting constituents who need to access that information. Of course we are frustrated that we have to wait till 2026, but if we had left it to the Governor’s wish, it was going to be even later.

As we have learned from other important bills vetoed last week, the negotiation process corners the bill sponsors into making bad concessions to save the bill from getting vetoed. But we saw a few instances, for bills that I co-sponsored and was pushing to see signed into law, where the sponsors rejected amendments that would have weakened the bill to the point of ineffectiveness, and the Governor responded by vetoing it. One example is the NY Tropical Deforestation-Free Procurement Act, which would have committed New York to ensuring its procurement contracts don't contribute to tropical deforestation. Its lead sponsor in the Senate, Liz Krueger, said in her statement that it was not worth agreeing to an ineffective version of the bill just so that she can send out a press release saying she passed it. And I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. The stakes are too high to play by the rules of a game that serves no one.

As always, it’s the big lobbyists that do the work behind the scenes. New York Focus reported in November that Sysco, a multinational food corporation that has more than $200 million in contracts to provide food to various state agencies, was quietly lobbying to kill the deforestation bill. Once again, a big lobbyist has successfully overwritten the legislature’s democratic will. And this is exactly why I’m committed to continue working in the next several years to clean up campaign finance and lobbying laws, make our government accountable and transparent, and use the legislature’s position to ensure checks and balances against misuse of power.”