Spitzer Tells Albany Leaders That He Seeks Partnership

Well Spitzer says the system’s broken and it is not the leaders? This is how it needs to be fixed. Split up the powers that the leaders have between 3 or 4 people, one person controls all the money for pork, campaign cash, committee seats etc…. By splitting up the power it will hopefully break the dictatorship run legislature. JMHO….

Spitzer Tells Albany Leaders That He Seeks Partnership – New York Times
ALBANY — Governor-elect Eliot L. Spitzer struck a conciliatory note yesterday in his first meeting with state legislative leaders since last week’s elections, saying he hoped to enlist them as partners in enacting his campaign pledge to revamp the state’s gridlock-prone government.

“I will take very seriously the opportunity I have been given to work with my colleagues in government — not to lecture them, not to lay down lines in the sand and say you must abide by this because I happen to be the governor or the governor-elect,” Mr. Spitzer said yesterday, after meeting for an hour with Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, and Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, in his office at the Capitol.

“We will work together,” Mr. Spitzer said. “That is what this is all about.”

Mr. Spitzer, who as state attorney general has been known for a pugilistic sensibility, vowed during the campaign to fight for nonpartisan legislative redistricting, tighter campaign finance laws and an overhaul of the legislative process, which is secretive and tightly controlled by the legislative leaders.

But yesterday, standing with the two men who exert more influence over that process than any others — and whose help he will need to enact any significant changes to the way Albany does business — Mr. Spitzer insisted that the problem was the system itself, not those who run it.

“I do not individualize, or say that individuals have come to be the problem,” he said. Mr. Spitzer added that Mr. Silver, like him a Democrat, and Mr. Bruno, a Republican, “are individuals of consummate good faith.”