Despite a mandate from Gov. Kathy Hochul, a pitiful 0.4% of the 130,000 New York state employees have completed a live sexual harassment and ethics training they’re legally required to take, according to a report on Sunday.
Hochul, who promised to change the culture of Albany when she took office in the wake of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s sexual harassment scandal and subsequent resignation, made the training a key part of her plan, The New York Times reported.
The governor said employees could not “click their way through a class” under her watch, according to the paper, which showed Hochul didn’t provide resources to realize her promise.
“We are working very hard to erase this culture so all women, all people, feel free from discrimination, harassment and abuse in the New York state workplace,” she told The Post in October 2021.
More than a year later, she has yet to establish a universal class for all the employees to take on the subject.
“What we’re requiring is not scalable,” Assemblywoman Pat Fahy, a Democrat representing Albany, told The Times. “We went overboard with the requirements without giving any of the tools to implement it.”
Before she took office, about 35,000 employees were subject to mandatory ethics training, a number almost quadrupled with her mandate, according to the Times.
“This was a well intentioned but not long-thought-out process that needs further attention,” Assemblymember John McDonald, also a Democrat from the Capital Region, said.
The governor has come under fire herself for ethical shortcomings, including her backroom deal to build a new stadium for her hometown Buffalo Bills. New York taxpayers will pay an unprecedented $850 million in public money for the stadium’s $1.4 billion construction.
It proved especially controversial after it was revealed her husband Bill Hochul is senior vice president and general counsel for Delaware North, a major food concessionaire at the Buffalo Bills’ current stadium.
To make matters worse, her hand-picked Lieutenant Gov. Brian Benjamin resigned in April after being indicted by federal prosecutors in Manhattan on corruption-related charges, some of which were later dropped.
Hochul flak Hazel Crampton-Hays told the Times that “rooting out a centuries-old culture of sexism and corruption is not an overnight task, and using arbitrary benchmarks for one of the many good government initiatives undertaken by this governor to evaluate a commitment to culture shift is missing the forest for the trees.”
Crampton-Hays also said that the state ethics commission was given $2 million more under Hochul than Cuomo — but the group’s interim chairman Frederick Davie seemed to imply it wasn’t enough.
“We have to have the resources to do it,” he said. “Otherwise, the whole thing is a mockery.”