Jeffrey D. Klein (Getty)

The millennium arrived sometime during the day of December 4, when New York State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein led his spanking new Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) over to the Republican side of the aisle.

Talk about the rapidly approaching Mayan apocalypse! Mr. Klein, a Bronx Democrat, assures us that he and four fellow Democrats will soon pass much of the liberal agenda in New York…by keeping majority leader Dean G. Skelos and his fellow Republicans in charge.

“Working with the governor and our colleague, I know that we will pass some major progressive reforms, such as an increase to the minimum wage, a reform of stop-and-frisk and serious campaign finance reform,” Mr. Klein told The New York Times, while posing heroically between old campaign posters for both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Vliet Lindsay.

Yes, and the lion shall lie down with the lamb—though as Woody Allen added, the lamb won’t get much sleep.

Under their power-sharing arrangement, the Republicans and the IDC are supposed to have “joint and equal authority,” with Mr. Klein and Mr. Skelos alternating as temporary president of the state senate. It’s an arrangement being touted by many as a means of finally breaking Albany’s perpetual gridlock, which dates back to approximately 1540.

Syracuse Mayor Stephanie A. Miner, recently installed as Democratic state co-chairwoman by Governor Andrew Cuomo, claimed that she saw the new arrangement as “a pathway out of dysfunction,” while Mr. Cuomo himself, allegedly a Democrat, reacted by proclaiming that he was willing to work with anyone, and that, “I don’t get hung up on politics.”

Well, sure. Why get all hung up over, y’know, politics, when you’re a governor?

This now marks the second time in four years that voters have made history by handing all three branches of the state government over to one party—only to see the Democrats punt their power away. The nonpartisan millennium was originally heralded just after the 2008 elections, when the party took control of the senate for the first time since 1964. But rather than trying to enact any of the social justice legislation they had been advocating for decades, Democrats decided to fight over who was in charge. Employing reformist rhetoric similar to what we’re hearing now, the “gang of four” Democratic senators from the city—Pedro Espada, Jr., Rev. Ruben Diaz, Sr., Carl Kruger, and Hiram Montserrate—broke away from the party and threatened to make their own deal with Republicans.

In fact, the gang of four’s attempted coup might best be described as “a pathway out of jail.” For the most part, it failed. Even by Albany standards, “the four amigos,” as Rev. Diaz prefers to call them, set new lows in sleaze, corruption, and general hate-mongering. Mr. Montserrate was expelled from the senate after being convicted of a nauseating assault on his girlfriend. Mr. Kruger—a closeted gay man who voted against gay marriage—got seven years in the state pen for accepting over $1 million in bribes. Mr. Espada awaits sentencing after pleading guilty to swiping nearly half a million dollars in Medicaid funds intended for his chain of health-care clinics, a feat accomplished by viciously ripping off patients and employees alike.

Only Mr. Diaz—a man who once made a speech on the senate floor calling Americans worse than Hitler for allowing abortions—remains in office and unindicted.

The renegade legislators spent months trying to sell their allegiances to the highest bidder, while further masking their true goals under the rhetoric of ethnic grievance. The four amigos claimed that Latinos would be shut out of leadership in Albany if the traditional “three men in a room” that decide everything there consisted of the senate Democratic leader, Malcolm Smith, who happened to be black; state assembly speaker Sheldon Silver, and then-governor David Paterson. In the end, they went back to the Democrats after replacing Mr. Smith with Senator John Sampson…who is also black.

Disgusted voters swept the Republicans back into power in 2010—only to sweep them out once more. And now the race card is being played again, as Rev. Al Sharpton has entered the fray—oh, joy—to claim that African Americans will be disenfranchised if Mr. Klein joins Mssrs. Skelos, Silver, and Cuomo as the fourth man in the room.

Mr. Klein and the three other white senators in his IDC promptly went out and cynically added to their ranks…Malcolm Smith, who has been openly pondering a run for mayor on the Republican line. This undermined any claims they might have had to being real reformers, as the ethically porous Mr. Smith has been investigated for his role in trying to steer a massive state contract for a “racino” at the Aqueduct Racetrack to a favored bidder.

The Big A is proving to be the black hole of New York politics, sucking in and crushing all who approach it. Also under investigation for bid-fixing at Aqueduct has been…John Sampson. The racino debacle put the final nail in the coffin of David Paterson’s disastrous governorship, and nearly capsized longtime Queens powerbroker and former congressman Rev. Floyd Flake. Gov. Cuomo’s attempt to replace the whole racino idea with a huge convention center/gambling complex—a complex that would be developed and run by one of his major campaign donors—has already proved a risible flop.

It’s no coincidence that so many of our leading pols have found themselves irresistibly drawn to the assorted Aqueduct scams. Gambling is not a growth industry. It’s a cancer, one that feeds addiction and funnels billions of dollars from the poor, the lonely, and the desperate to a wealthy few. It’s the sort of brain-dead idea that—in an age of technological wonders—is all the insulated deal-makers who run the state of New York can come up with for our future.

Mr. Klein’s nonpartisan posturing won’t cut through that insulation, only add more layers than Bob Vila. You can rest assured that his supposed liberal agenda will never see the light of day in Albany without a conservative quid pro quo—a racino here, a little fracking there, etc. A system where party labels and platforms and promises mean absolutely nothing—where there is, in essence, one big party—is one that will usher in a politics of meaninglessness, where corruption is free to flourish as never before and democracy is a cynical charade.

Or as the Rev. Ruben Diaz posted on his website last week, “Diaz to IDC: you’ve vindicated the ‘Four Amigos.’ ”

Wrong. After all, these are not ordinary times.

The apparent victory of Republican upstart David Storobin in a special election to fill Carl Kruger’s former Senate seat is, in fact, an enormous win for Governor Andrew Cuomo. Why? Because Senate Democrats under the retrograde leadership of Brooklyn’s John Sampson remain opposed to the governor’s aggressive and necessary leadership on pension reform.

Mr. Sampson has characterized Mr. Cuomo’s recent pension reforms as an “assault on working men and women in New York State.” This no doubt will come as a surprise to those working men and women who otherwise would have to pay for out-of-control public-employee pensions in the decades to come. Mr. Sampson’s rhetoric, however, actually is no surprise. He and his colleagues remain stuck in a time warp. They still think it’s acceptable to lard up public-employee contracts in exchange for union support and contributions.

The special election in Brooklyn was not solely a referendum on Mr. Cuomo and the astonishing changes he has implemented or negotiated over the past year. Voters no doubt sought to send a message to the political establishment after the longtime incumbent, Mr. Kruger, resigned in disgrace in a corruption scandal. Mr. Kruger became a poster boy for all that is rotten about the status quo in Albany. His former constituents had every reason to turn their backs on Mr. Kruger’s party and onetime allies.

Still, though, it is hard not to conclude that this special election captured the mood of an impatient and exhausted electorate fed up with business as usual. And that’s precisely what the Senate Democrats stand for, and why they clearly deserve to remain on the outside looking in when important decisions are made in the statehouse.

Mr. Cuomo has shrewdly aligned himself with those lawmakers, public policy advocates and union leaders who understand that the old ways of governing are over. Party labels and outdated dogma are unimportant­—what matters is flexibility, creativity and an open mind.  As a result, Mr. Cuomo has enjoyed support from more than a few Republicans in the Legislature as he attempts to put the brakes on public-employee benefits that simply should never have been granted in the first place.

Many of Mr. Cuomo’s fellow Democrats, including a small but influential group in the State Senate, understand that the state simply cannot sustain the level of benefits and perks handed out in the past. Unfortunately, top Democrats in the Senate remain wedded to the policies of the past. They play the class card because they have no other argument.

Voters in Brooklyn made it clear that they will not stand for a return to dysfunctional state government. Mr. Sampson and his colleagues had better pay attention.

In the The Adjustment Bureau, now in theaters, Matt Damon's campaign is engineered by fedora-wearing angels, who make little tweaks in reality in order to propel his candidacy. And in Limitless, opening Friday, Bradley Cooper plays a failed writer who stumbles onto an experimental smart drug that unlocks the "other 80 percent" of his brain. Soon enough, he, too, is a senatorial shoe-in. 

In the movies, of course, anything's possible. "Remember Animal House?" asked longtime operative Roger Stone, noting that the comedy's end credits portrayed John "Bluto" Blutarski as a future senator.

These days, even with supernatural assistance, defeating a New York incumbent would probably be an uphill climb, though Mr. Stone pointed out that "if divine intervention includes hundreds of millions of dollars, it could happen."

Hollywood's plot devices are probably easier for audiences to stomach than the brutal reality of politics in the state, noted veteran consultant Hank Sheinkopf. "A movie could never show the aggravation, the personal drain and the emotional upset of a real campaign," he pointed out.

Randy Credico, who mounted an unsuccessful bid against Senator Charles Schumer in 2010, was still fuming about his primary loss when reached by The Observer. "Chuck's got the real angels, which are the guys with $25 million!" Mr. Credico said. "Plus, he controls every federal judge."

Mr. Credico was speaking from the airport, where he was awaiting a flight to Nicaragua. The purpose of the trip was "to take a look at an assembly that actually debates stuff," he said, and to work on a book. "It's a kiss-and-tell," he added. "Schneiderman and Cuomo won't be happy. I know where the skeletons are buried, and they're all going to come out." Mr. Credico claimed he already had a publisher and an editor lined up.

Next stop, Hollywood!

Seriously, New York's halls of power are starting to resemble an old episode of "Night of 1,000 Stars!" 

Check out New York's Lawmaker Lookalikes >>

(By the way, one more resemblance of note—that of this very feature to Spy magazine's beloved "Separated at Birth" column. We know. We get that all the time.)

But then, quietly, something else happened. By a vote of 60 to 1, the State Senate passed a bill that if signed into law will create an entirely new species of company in New York. Sponsored by a state senator named Daniel Squadron, a 30-year-old who beat 30-year incumbent Marty Connor last election, bill No. S7855 makes room in state corporate law for a legal middle ground between nonprofits and ordinary businesses.

It is what's known as a benefit corporation, which, as an idea, has been around for years. But state laws allowing them to be established have been passed only in Maryland and Vermont, and so recently that they haven't yet gone into effect.

"I'm both a member of the New York State Senate and an eternal optimist," a bearded and bespectacled Mr. Squadron said this week. "You have entrepreneurs and investors who want to do good, but also want to do it in the context of all the capital and all the resources in the for-profit world." But the corporate duty to develop shareholder value, he said, doesn't leave room to pay serious attention to missions.

"From a left-wing perspective, you can say it would bring to New York the kind of corporations that care about the environment or reach out to underserved communities," said Andrew Greenblatt, an investor and N.Y.U. public administration professor who worked on the bill. "From a right-wing perspective, what this bill does is, it lessens the regulatory grip that New York State has over corporate purpose by saying you can now create corporations that have missions beyond just profit maximization."

Mr. Greenblatt used to work for Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's, the ice cream company that was taken over a decade ago by Unilever. Both founders have blamed the sale on directors who felt they couldn't turn the conglomerate away. "Right now, the law compels companies to be guided solely and exclusively by company profit. And companies can be sued for veering from that," said Jamie Raskin, the Maryland state senator who sponsored the bill there, and a professor of constitutional law at American University. "We're living in a time where the crises are piling up all around us from corporations that ignore the public interest. We said that we need a new business model that companies can opt for."

According to the New York bill, which could potentially be voted on by the Assembly before its summer break, a benefit corporation's leaders will be allowed-and required-to consider stockholders, employees, suppliers' workforce, customers, communities and the environment when making decisions. The idea, almost quaintly, is for them to make a difference while making money.

MR. GREENBLATT HAPPENS to live in an apartment in Mr. Squadron's downtown district. Two years ago, he got a request from a friend: Would he take the candidate through his Battery Park complex to knock on doors? He didn't know much about the politician, but he also didn't like Mr. Connor, the incumbent.

While they were walking, Mr. Squadron asked what he did for a living. Mr. Greenblatt happened to bring up his qualms with the current concept of fiduciary duty, which binds a company's leaders to the pursuit of profit. Mr. Squadron said it sounded interesting, and that they should talk about it if he got elected. "What a good politician," Mr. Greenblatt thought. "I'm not going to fall for that, but good for him."

A few months later, Mr. Greenblatt happened to spot Mr. Squadron at a fund-raiser for his two kids' public school. "I doubted he would remember me, and if he did, I certainly wasn't going to pester him on my little problem," he said. "He walks right up to me: 'Hi Andrew. How's Miles? How's G.G.?'" His kids had been home when they start knocking on the doors.

He raised the fiduciary problem, which led to phone calls. Eventually, Mr. Greenblatt introduced him to Andrew Kassoy, a former private-equity executive at Credit Suisse and at the billionaire Michael Dell's investment firm. Mr. Kassoy left to start a nonprofit called B Lab with two college friends in 2006, a year after they'd sold their basketball apparel company, And 1. The idea is to unofficially certify companies as benefit corporations: So far they've named more than 300, with combined revenue of $1.1 billion.

This spring, working along with the Philadelphia attorney William H. Clark, Jr., who penned his state's corporation law, they drafted their New York bill. "We're going to have one bad piece of news after the next as long as business is being done by the old rules," Mr. Kassoy said this week. "I think it's pretty clear: Short-term value maximization is a bankrupt strategy."

Actually, the corporate world has been talking about the bigger picture for decades. Goldman senior partner Gus Levy, who died when Gerald Ford was still president, was famous for his mantra of long-term greed. And as The Observer wrote last week, what Wall Street calls its corporate social responsibility, or community reinvestment, or responsible finance, or global citizenship, has been in full effect lately. "I'm glad that people do it, and I think it's a start," Mr. Clark said about C.S.R. programs. "But it's just a step along the road."

LAST WEEK, THE morning after the bill passed, Mr. Greenblatt got in a Zipcar and drove to Albany to start rounding up support in the Assembly, where the bill needs approval before it's signed into law. The one nay in the Senate came from a Republican named Owen H. Johnson, who did not return several messages. Mr. Squadron said he didn't understand that lone vote.

The bill allows a company the option to become a benefit corporation if it can show "material, positive impact on society and the environment." And an existing company can try to be named one after a two-thirds shareholder vote. "I support it because it's an option," said Republican Assemblywoman Jane Corwin, the ranking minority member on the Corporations, Authorities and Commissions Committee, who just signed on to cosponsor the bill.

Mr. Squadron wants a quick Assembly vote before the summer recess, but Ms. Corwin isn't confident. "I don't see this passing immediately," she said. "Right now, I just don't know how much time we have."

The commissions committee chairman, Richard Brodsky, a Democratic candidate for attorney general, sees other problems. "The bill has technical components that need to be fixed," he said this week. For example, he said, it may inadvertently interfere with shareholders' rights to bring lawsuits.

Mr. Squadron said his colleague's issues were fixable. "We're in a race with other large states to be the first to offer this opportunity to entrepreneurs and investors," he said. "Here's the thing: Vermont and Maryland are very important, it's very exciting. But for this to happen in New York is a very big deal."

Mr. Clark said that similar legislation is going to be introduced in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Oregon, Washington and Colorado are interested as well. And California has been dealing with its own version of a benefit corporation statute.

"When we talk about this stuff," said Mr. Kassoy from B Lab, "people say, 'Well you can't start thinking about these issues; companies will take their eye off the ball. It will cause total erosion in profits and margins!' My response to that is the strategy of short-term value maximization eroded a couple trillion dollars of value over the past two years. ... To me, in many ways, it is intuitive that business will be more successful if it actually pays attention to its impact."

Mr. Clark isn't as sure that a benefit corporation's goodness will always be lucrative. "The honest answer is, we don't know. We hope it is. That's one of the things we're going to find out."

mabelson@observer.com

“I’m a man of faith, so I always pray,” Senator John Sampson, the leader of the Democratic conference, said just after noon as he walked past the sign. He had been asked if there was any prayer of reaching an agreement to bridge a roughly $3 billion budget imbalance. “We’re working hard. We’re working very hard.”

Here in the Capitol, a combination of prayer and hard deliberation gets you … a tentative budget agreement that solves no long-term problems, makes all parties to the accord unhappy and is almost certain to be litigated.

Mr. Sampson had just met with Sheldon Silver, the Entish speaker of the State Assembly. He did not say so, but after a four-week stalemate, he and Mr. Silver were ready to take a $2.8 billion deal package to David Paterson. It was the only thing Mr. Sampson could get his Senate Democrats—who hold a one-seat majority in the highly dysfunctional 32-member chamber—to agree to, and its apparent acceptance by the governor the evening of Monday, Nov. 30, ended a game of fiscal chicken that Mr. Paterson and senators had played for over a month.

The next morning, confusion reigned. The New York Post’s Fred Dicker played the Twilight Zone theme on his morning radio show. Bills that legislative leaders were expecting didn’t immediately materialize. Mr. Paterson went on the radio to say the legislators “want to get out of Albany by taking on half of the problem,” and the agreement “isn’t recurring and isn’t particularly real.”

No one knew if this was calculated bluster or genuine disagreement. Mr. Sampson went once again to Mr. Silver’s office, and said when he exited that “we have our staff working on a compromise.”

Finally, Mr. Paterson said at 11 a.m. that the argument had shifted over who would send what bill language when and in what form, but he was tied to the Legislature’s “last, best and final offer.”

“Look, the reality is that when John Sampson says, ‘I don’t have 32 votes for something,’ it’s no longer a negotiating tactic,” said a frustrated Senator Eric Schneiderman, a Manhattan Democrat who is one of Mr. Sampson’s top lieutenants. “Everybody, including the governor, has just got to accept that.”

Mr. Sampson is a bulky man who rations his words as if they were a precious commodity, and who arguably has the least enviable job in Albany. He is in charge of herding a factionalized group of Senate Democrats who have realized over the course of a year that any one of them can hold out for whatever they want until everyone else tires of the stalemate and gives it to them—the individual benefit trumping the collective good every time.

This time the issue was proposed cuts to school aid in the middle of the year, and according to conversations with several Democratic senators, the principal obstructionist was Long Island Democrat Craig Johnson.

“My position’s very clear: It’s about protecting the property taxpayer throughout New York State, it’s about protecting the children and our schools—private or public and the parents who send them and the grandparents who love those kids,” Mr. Johnson said on the chamber floor Monday, insisting that he is not just focused on his political well-being. (There are the children, but there are also the members and dollars wielded by the teachers’ union.)

“I’m being what I’m supposed to be, which is a state senator representing not just the seventh senatorial district, but the residents in New York State,” he said.

At first in private, and then publicly, Mr. Johnson drew his line in the sand. Others—including Brian Foley, Darrel Aubertine, David Valesky, Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Bill Stachowski—joined him. Republicans took the same position because, out of power, they could. (They were opposed to mid-year cuts to school aid last year, too, when they controlled the Senate.) Mr. Silver and his colleagues in the Assembly sat frustrated. The state was stuck.

For most of that afternoon, the Senate floor had been empty. In typical fashion, the deal was being hammered out by leaders in private. Senators had no legislation to consider, with Mr. Sampson huddling at the Governor’s Mansion on Eagle Street with Messrs. Silver and Paterson. Many members sipped cola or coffee taken from a members lounge. Two compared turkey brining techniques they had used over Thanksgiving.

In what one assumes is a very deliberately cultivated contrast to the unabashedly sluggish senators, Mr. Paterson has spent the last month trying desperately to convince voters, at high volume, that New York will run out of money if nothing is done. The state, with a budget of more than $130 billion, would have about $36 million in the bank by December’s end, he has said, repeatedly.

Mr. Paterson’s own political standing is low, and he has bashed the even-less-popular legislators to make himself look stronger, even soliciting campaign contributions in the process. He has made the case that while it is difficult, school aid must be cut to save money going forward. When this argument did not work, he asked the Legislature for the power to let him cut things himself—a roundly rejected, constitutionally dubious, fiduciary equivalent of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.

“The Senate in particular doesn’t know that we’ve run out of time, or knows that we have run out of time and apparently is more concerned with the short-term politics than the long-term realities,” Mr. Paterson said on a Nov. 29 conference call with journalists. “Some of these senators said last week that they were not going to let me do their jobs. My question is: When are they going to do their jobs? Their job is not placating special interests and running back to their districts with their hands in the air saying, ‘Look what we didn’t cut.’”

The Senate had responded at various points with counterproposals, but the ideas have been fiscally loose at best and downright wacky at worst. The most outrageous have tended to come from Senator Carl Kruger, the slouching South Brooklynite who became chairman of the chamber’s Finance Committee after he corralled three other senators into a faction and strategically forced perks from the leadership.

He claimed at a press conference on Nov. 16 that $135 million could be realized in December by collecting taxes on cigarettes sold on tribal reservations. The idea, baffling even Mr. Sampson’s top staffers, dominated discourse for a week, and gave Mr. Paterson an excuse to bash the Senate for another week when, by private accounts, a deal was close at hand.

Mr. Kruger did not bother to attend Monday’s session. He instead sat two floors below the chamber, conspicuously enjoying lunch with his “amigos”: Senators Hiram Monserrate—who is due in court this week to be sentenced for an assault conviction—and Ruben Diaz Sr., who contributed to the stalemate by staying in his Bronx district to distribute turkeys rather than come to Albany.

“It’s a game!” Mr. Diaz said.

“There’s more than adequate common ground where we could have closed this down two weeks ago,” Mr. Kruger said, seriously.

They shuffled upstairs. Messrs. Sampson and Silver returned from the Governor’s Mansion, having secured Mr. Paterson’s agreement to a package of deficit reduction that contained $2.8 billion of fund sweeps, one-shot allotments and cuts to state agencies and health care. Mr. Silver told his members of the deal in a closed-door session around 6:30 p.m. Monday, the members said. Mr. Sampson told Mr. Kruger, as well as Senators Jeff Klein, Liz Krueger, Pedro Espada Jr. and Malcolm Smith, in a smaller room. Mr. Kruger, someone familiar with the meeting said, was especially giddy.

On Tuesday, after the tentative agreement was reached, Mr. Paterson proclaimed himself dissatisfied. He insisted that he might still delay some payments for school districts because the legislators hadn’t gone far enough in cutting spending. But whatever—he wasn’t going to get anything more, and seemed sick of the stalemate.

“It does give us about $600 million in cuts, and some other measures that require legislative approval,” Mr. Paterson said. “So we will not cut off our nose to spite our face.”

jvielkind@observer.com

“I got a call the other day from an Albany politician,” said Mr. Rudin, the chairman of the Association for a Better New York, speaking in his capacity as the head of one of New York real estate's most powerful families. “He called for money. I said to him, ‘Until you get your house in order’ – I think this is the first time I’ve done this – ‘until you have a coherent plan, I’m not giving you any money.’”

The occasion was a breakfast hosted by WX, New York Women Executives in Real Estate, an invite-only organization, 60 or so members of which showed up at 8 a.m. to hear Mr. Rudin regale them with stories of his family's rise from Russian immigrants to New York barons, and the importance of civic engagement.

Mr. Rudin declined to reveal who, precisely, the unlucky politician was, but according to a source familiar with the conversation, it was Bronx and Westchester State Senator Jeffrey Klein.

"I did call him," Mr. Klein told The Observer. "He did say that."

"The only thing I can say is, I’ve been very active in Albany, even through the very horrible times we had in June and July," Mr. Klein continued. "The governor signed my email notification bill for dangerous sexual predators."

He also mentioned legislation that requires banks to maintain houses they foreclose on, and that requires homeowners be given more notification before they lose their homes to banks. 

Mr. Klein says he's long favored property tax caps, one of Mr. Rudin's pet causes (some of his others include solving the state's constant budget shortfalls and having government workers making a greater contribution to benefits).

While Mr. Klein said he had plenty of other contributors, losing Mr. Rudin's money is not a miniscule matter. In just January and February of this year, Mr. Rudin and his family contributed $8,000 to New Yorkers for Klein, according to state records.

Mr. Rudin's slap-down of the politician is not entirely unprecedented in the real estate world, which functions as something of an ATM for Albany politicians. A New York Times article from way back when (and buried so deep within Lexis-Nexis that it is, at this point, merely apocryphal) detailed how Douglas Durst decided to withhold contributions to Albany. It's a policy he's since rescinded. 

But it's a policy that just might inspire fear in the halls of Albany. After all, just imagine if Mr. Rudin's idea caught on...

drubinstein@observer.com

The site allows users to search for bills by sponsor, committee, recent actions, and recent votes. You can also search by keyword, like, say, "bicycle" and find relevant bills and data available in four different formats.

Most of this information was already available online, chief information officer Andrew Hoppin told the Observer. But it was dispersed over several different sites, didn't have permanent links and was also "un-Google-able." Bills also weren't available in so many formats, in near real-time. The public can now find each bill through the portal and comment on it.

"We knew from the beginning that we wanted to get data directly into the Senate's hands," Mr. Hoppin told the Observer. But especially the people's fingertips. "We didn't just want to point people at it somewhere on the Web, but also make it available in a well-structured form for people to use and reuse in different forms."

The site will mostly be useful for Senators, developers and media types looking to display specific data in charts during campaigns or check out a bill status. But Mr. Hoppin said he hopes more everyday citizens will be interested in the data as well.

"We wanted to sort of show that an important part of transparency is not just about the data literally being available or even being accessible," he said. "It has to be easy to find so people can make use of it and share it and also give feedback."

Mr. Hoppin and his team will update the site by the end of the month with more information that "has never been seen before on the Internet," according to Mr. Hoppin, thanks to the rules reforms passed by the Senate in June. The data collected, which was previously only available by enacting the Freedom of Information Act, will include detailed transcripts of sessions, committee votes and committee attendance.

As the Observer reported in June, Ben Kallos, former chief of staff to Assemblyman Jonathan Bing who was working on Mark Green's campaign, launched NewYork.OpenLegislation.org, which allowed users see how each lawmaker voted on a particular piece of legislation and see whether lawmakers attended their committee meetings. Mr. Kallos and a few of his colleagues paid for the site out of his own pocket.

The state's moves to make this kind of data more available to the public are ahead of City Hall, where Gale Brewer, chair of the Council's Technology in Government Committee, is leading the open legislation charge.

At a press conference in Sunset Park about development plans there, Bloomberg was asked about one of his earlier comments about state senators who are delaying the renewal of mayoral control; in that comment, Bloomberg evoked Neville Chamberlain in explaining why further attempts at negotiation with Democratic opponents of mayoral control would be counterproductive. (At a press conference today in Manhattan, some of the senators in question said the remark was inappropriate since, in the analogy, the Democratic conference in the State Senate would be, well, Nazi Germany.)

Asked today whether he meant to compare the senators to the Nazis, the mayor said, "I certainly did. What part of that did they not understand? This is ridiculous."

UPDATE: The exact question, from New York 1 reporter Rita Nissan, was, "Your comments about Chamberlain on Friday--they’re upset by that and they feel they are owed an apology. They feel that you compared them to Nazis."

UPDATE: After the event this afternoon, Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser emailed the following explanation:

I am writing because there’s some confusion on a few people’s part what the Mayor said Friday on the radio show about Neville Chamberlain.

It wasn’t an analogy at all – the Mayor was talking about endless negotiations in general. The former Prime Minister’s name is now synonymous in the American lexicon with appeasement and endless negotiations. Since it wasn’t an analogy, the Mayor wasn’t comparing anyone to anyone else.

Here’s what the Mayor said on Friday’s radio show:

“And the Teachers Union, in all fairness, Randi’s been helpful – I mean, we could be doing so many more things and instead, we’re spending our time talking just- and every time- there’s a point at which- if you remember Neville Chamberlain. No matter how many times you said yes, that’s the starting point for the next round. There’s always more, more, more. I think that just the time for that is over.”

On the pier today, the Mayor couldn’t hear Rita’s question clearly, and neither could Andrew Brent, who was standing right by her.

The old Board of Education was unaccountable and inefficient, staffed with political patronage hires and time-servers. Successive mayors were unable to tear down the walls that separated New York’s schoolchildren from the delivery of a sound public education. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, however, has succeeded where others failed. That’s why the board’s old headquarters on Livingston Street is now a condo, and accountable educators have taken up residence in the Tweed Courthouse, home of the Department of Education.

Mayoral control of the schools was due to expire this month, inspiring thoughts that pressure groups might lean on the Democratic-controlled Assembly to either block continued reform or water down mayoral control so drastically that the schools would return to the education bureaucrats who mismanaged the system for so many years. Mr. Silver, who is hardly a friend of Mr. Bloomberg, realized that mayoral control has produced real results in the classroom. And so he and other key Democrats, including the Education Committee chair, Catherine Nolan, voted in favor of the new, successful order.

Now it’s up to the State Senate—a scary thought indeed. The good senators have not had a chance to vote on this vital issue because they’re not sure who’s in charge. Perhaps they’ll get around to the people’s business one of these days.