NYPIRG: Commission Should Investigate Paterson’s Yankees Tickets
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- November
- 2
Blair Horner, legislative director at the New York Public Interest Research Group, said the state Commission on Public Integrity should investigate whether Gov. David Paterson solicited World Series tickets from the Yankees, which hires lobbyists and does business with the state.
The New York Post reported today that Paterson sought free tickets to the Yankees home opener last week, which would violate the state’s gift ban for elected officials.
“On one hand it’s incomprehensible and the other hand it’s indefensible,” Horner said. “The Yankees are registered lobbyists. What were they (the Paterson administration) thinking?”
So will the Commission on Public Integrity investigate? They won’t say.
“An investigation is confidential until we issue a notice of reasonable cause,” said spokesman Walter Ayres. “And if we look at something, we’re required to keep that confidential.”
The embattled commission last week quietly dropped an investigation into whether Paterson improperly leaked information to the media about Caroline Kennedy after she withdrew from the U.S. Senate contest in January.
This entry was posted
on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 3:34 pm by Joseph Spector.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
I thought the Governor was a Met fan. why would he need yankee tickets?