New York’s first female governor Kathy Hochul took the helm of the state last week promising a “new era of transparency.” Her ascension comes after the stunning fall of Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was found by an attorney general’s report to have sexually harassed multiple women while fostering a hostile environment that allowed the abuse to flourish.

In her first remarks to New Yorkers as governor last Tuesday, she promised to rid Albany of sexual harassers, to provide a better stream of clear and transparent information to the people of the state, and restore faith in government. 

Her words came as music to the ears of many good government groups who were long ignored by Cuomo’s administration. But many incoming governors have promised to clean up the opaque morass of state government, just as Cuomo did, before he suddenly disbanded the anti-corruption task force he created, once it started eyeing his allies a little too closely.

“The Hochul Administration will continue to explore all ways to prioritize open, ethical governing that New Yorkers will trust," said Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokesperson for Hochul, asked to comment on various ways experts have said Hochul could prove she was serious about rooting out corruption and forging a more transparent state government.

Here’s what some of those experts said.

Go Beyond Recusal When Her Own Conflicts of Interest Arise

Right off the bat, Hochul will face several tests that have to do with her own potential conflicts of interest. Her husband, William Hochul, is the senior vice president and general counsel of Delaware North, an entertainment and gaming conglomerate that has many contracts before the state. Relatedly, Delaware North has the concessions contract at the Buffalo Bills’ Highmark Stadium—a venue the Bills are looking to leave. Bills owner Terry Pegula, a major Cuomo donor, has said he’s seeking public funding for a new $1.1 billion stadium. 

With all that said, Hochul has the opportunity to break from the past tradition of agreeing to offer major state subsidies to private companies behind closed doors, like Cuomo did for the ill-fated Amazon deal or the flopped Central New York Film Hub. Instead, she could turn the matter to the state legislature to have it go through the traditional state budgeting process. 

“Transparency is painful. It can slow things down. It can make deals harder to get to,” John Kaehny, the executive director of Reinvent Albany, admitted, though he said the stakes are too high to continue to do otherwise. “We can’t have Amazon deals again and again and again where billions of dollars are being discussed in secret.”

Hochul has also promised to put in place a recusal policy whenever her husband’s company Delaware North is involved. Having an outside entity like the State Attorney General or the Comptroller’s office vet those policies, would give the public more assurance the policy was legitimate, Kaehny said.

“She can talk all she wants about the measures she takes, but unless they’re independently verified there’s no way the public can know,” he said.

Make the State Budget Process More Public 

A 2004 court case Pataki versus Silver enshrined the New York State governor’s unilateral authority in the state budgeting process, giving the legislature few tools other than a drastic veto to dissent if they disagreed with any specific part of it. Cuomo took full advantage of his budgetary dominance, often slipping in pet items at the last minute, like the 2017 renaming of the Tappan Zee Bridge after his father, the 2019 provision that threatened the existence of his political nemesis the Working Families Party or the 2020 tweak that gave nursing homes immunity for COVID-19 deaths in 2020.

“[He’d] essentially dare us to stop school funding and healthcare funding in order to potentially stop one item that we don’t agree with,” said State Senate Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris said. “It became an exercise in the abuse of his powers.”

If budget negotiations remained public for longer, Gianaris and others said, there’d be no opportunity to slip these kinds of things in at the last minute. Others said Hochul could actually release budget proposals earlier in the process, rather than announcing proposals via press release but leaving all the fine print until the last minute. 

“It would give the public the ability to react in real time to what is being considered,” Gianaris said.

Appoint Competent Heads of Agencies and Not Micro-Manage Them

Cuomo’s heavy-handed management style often drove away even the most competent public servants. Case in point: the former New York City Transit President Andy Byford who was beloved by the public and transit employees alike and who oversaw a marked improvement in subway service, ultimately quit unceremoniously, later saying Cuomo’s interference made his job “intolerable.”

Janos Marton, the National Director of Dream Corps JUSTICE, and a former attorney on Cuomo’s defunct anti-corruption Moreland Commission, said simply giving competent people the space to do their jobs would go a long way. 

“Bringing in really strong people to lead state agencies and giving them the autonomy to do their work,” Marton said. “That would attract much stronger people to want to come work in New York State government.”

Hochul has already nodded towards this in an appearance on NY1, where she said she believed in “empowering leadership.”

Cuomo’s influence has also bled into watchdog agencies like the State Inspector General or the State Joint Commission on Public Ethics​​. Both are currently embroiled in a scandal surrounding a 2019 leak to former Governor Cuomo’s office, regarding an ethics investigation into his former top aide Joe Percocco, who is currently serving time on corruption charges in federal prison. 

Experts say Hochul could issue executive orders to create more of a firewall between her office and those agencies to help “politically insulate” them without changing the law or the state’s constitution. Things like banning certain types of communication between leadership in those agencies and the executive branch.

“You can create systems within the existing system that can work if the governor is willing to cede control over those entities,” said Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group. 

“There are steps she could take to make the existing, and in some cases, fatally flawed systems, still work better,” Horner said. “She could at least minimize the failures.”

Close the “License to Harass” Loophole

In her Tuesday speech, Hochul mentioned requiring sexual harassment training be done in person, rather than virtually, as part of her plan to rid Albany of sexual harrassers. That came as cold comfort to advocates who’ve been pushing for the state government to address the issue for years. 

“We know that training is nowhere near enough. It is so very easy for power abusers to dismiss things like training,” said Erica Vladimir, with the Sexual Harrassment Working Group. While the group has a full legislative agenda, their top priority is to close what they call the “license to harass loophole,” that essentially exempts the staff of elected and appointed state officials from the sexual harassment laws passed in 2019 under Cuomo. A bill currently exists in the state legislature to do that. 

“We cannot sit here and point to CEOs and employers and say you are required to do this but we the government are not gonna do it,” Vladimir said. “It’s the best way to set an example while actually protecting...staffers.”

Unleash the COVID-19 Data

Hochul took some steps towards greater transparency around COVID-19 pandemic by simply revising the state’s death tally to reflect the numbers submitted regularly to the federal government. Under Cuomo, the state’s death tally was about 12,000 than the figures it reported to the federal government because it excluded presumed covid deaths as well as ones that occurred outside of hospitals and traditional healthcare settings. 

Deliberate data manipulation by Cuomo’s administration, in part led to his downfall. His administration refused for months to release a full tally of nursing home residents who’d died from COVID-19, only admitting an undercount following the release of an attorney general report. 

But there’s still a whole array of other datasets good government groups and experts requested back in June that have yet to be released. It’s the type of data that could inform school reopening policy, improve vaccination efforts and better understand the pandemic’s impact overall. They asked for more than 100 different COVID-19 data breakdowns, and the Empire Center for Public Policy subsequently filed freedom of information requests for about 60 sets of data. To date, they’ve gotten back just a handful of responses. 

“It’s about restoring faith in the Health Department,” said Bill Hammond, the senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy. “Some of it could happen overnight.”