Budget

How New York Focus Inspected Campaign Finance Disclosures to Find Unnamed Intermediaries

The tricks that we use to cover state government work just as well when looking into city politics.

Alex Arriaga · March 22, 2025

Former editor-in-chief of the Albany Times Union Rex Smith paid a visit to our New York Focus office to reminisce about his decades covering New York. | Alex Arriaga

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With budget negotiations ongoing, now is the most important time of the year to pay attention to state government reporting, and New York Focus has been thoroughly covering what’s at stake in this year’s budget. On Monday, we published our 2025 guide to the state budget, comparing the governor, Senate, and Assembly’s spending and policy proposals. The budget doesn’t just determine how $250 billion of taxpayer dollars will be spent, it’s also used to enact policies that don’t involve spending money, which makes it a busy time in Albany for policy advocates and lobbyists to push their agendas. This year, for example, looks to be a battlefront on criminal justice policy between the governor and legislature as they debate over whether to roll back reforms to the state’s important evidence-sharing laws.

I wrote last week about the work that goes into the budget reporting process, so I was happy when a teacher reached out to ask how she can print the guide to share the resource with her students to teach them about the process. I’m interested to hear from more of you: If you use the budget guide in your work, reach out and let me know what you used it for and how it’s been helpful to you: alex@nysfocus.com.

Do you have questions about the budget? Ask them here.

With mayoral and New York City Council primaries coming up in June, our reporters also have their hands full covering city politics, tracking how people with power — or seeking it — are maneuvering the political process.

Late Thursday, Chris Bragg and Julia Rock had a Cuomo scoop: Lobbyist and Cuomo family loyalist Tonio Burgos sent out a fundraising email for Andrew Cuomo’s mayoral campaign, promising donors that their contributions would be matched by the city’s matching funds program, even though his role as a lobbyist makes his solicited donations ineligible for matching. Furthermore, the Cuomo campaign disclosed having “no intermediaries” raising money for his campaign.

My colleagues wrote: “New York Focus identified fundraising pages that the Cuomo campaign set up for around 30 bundlers, though it’s not clear how many of them have solicited donations yet. The pages tell donors that their gifts will be matched, even though at least five of the bundlers do work that disqualifies donations they solicit from matching funds.”

In the name of transparency, the New York City Campaign Finance Board requires that candidates name any “intermediaries,” also known as bundlers, when filing campaign finance disclosures. These are individuals or groups who work on behalf of a campaign to collect contributions, which are often matched with taxpayer dollars. When auditors — or journalists — inspect campaign finance records and find clusters of donations that share a common denominator, the presence of an intermediary becomes evident.

That’s how reporters Chris Gelardi and Rock peeled back the curtain on funds raised for city council candidates by a pro-Israel group. They were able to match donations to Solidarity PAC even though candidates did not disclose their involvement. I asked Gelardi. to explain his methodology, which he developed while reporting on the group’s involvement in state Assembly elections last year.

“I looked at the campaign finance filings for all the candidates who they endorsed,” Gelardi said. Then he looked at everyone who donated to Solidarity PAC and matched them up. “So you had this bundle.”

State and city campaign finance laws are a little different, but he told me he was able to use a similar method this year. He looked at the candidates endorsed by Solidarity PAC, downloaded their campaign finance filings from the city’s campaign contribution portal, and put all the donors who contributed to that slate of candidates onto the same spreadsheet.

“The donors who contributed to those candidates donated around the same time, which means they were likely responding to Solidarity PAC solicitations.”

Intermediaries are systematically underreported (see: Adams, Eric) and this is great reporting promoting transparency: https://t.co/Vfg64rHWnW
— Jeff Coltin (@JCColtin) March 20, 2025

While exposing campaign finance law compliance issues, the Solidarity PAC reporting also showed how the city’s $8-to-$1 public matching system might be limiting the influence of big money in local campaigns. When Solidarity PAC raised funds for state Assembly candidates, most donors were contributing the maximum $3,000. In the New York City Council races, however, most donors didn’t max out, instead opting to contribute $175 — the maximum amount eligible for the matching program.

MORE FROM NEW YORK FOCUS

A health care company with a shady past is set to take over the insurance plan for thousands of low-wage home health care workers. What they’re offering won’t cover basics like doctor’s visits, maternal care, hospitalization, or chemotherapy.

Sam Mellins reported that Jerry Weissman, the founder of the company Leading Edge, was once convicted and jailed for attempting to hide more than $80 million in losses during his time at Empire Blue Cross, and was then barred from management-level positions in insurance companies for 13 years. His workaround when getting back into the business to found Leading Edge was to put his wife at the head of the company, though Mellins reported that he was the true founder and manager.

Freelancer Zachary Groz wrote about an Eric Adams initiative that cost the city $100 million over two and a half years and didn’t amount to much. The MyCity portal was meant to make accessing the city’s social services easier, but after an army of private contractors have touched the project and profited, the website is still mostly incomplete. Lawmakers in Albany are considering a bill that could make it easier for agencies to share data and coordinate services, but privacy advocates are concerned about making it easier for police and federal agencies to access sensitive data.

We’re lucky that we have a team of six reporters digging into the state budget — these days, there are more flacks employed for government offices than reporters covering them. That’s not just the disgruntled local journalist in me talking: We’ve reported on the inflated PR budget of the NYPD, for example. Since coming in as police commissioner four months ago, Jessica Tisch slashed the NYPD public relations office nearly in half.

This week our office had a visit from Rex Smith, New York Focus board member and longtime New York journalist who worked at places like Newsday and the Albany Times Union at a time when newspapers could employ 600 people, send their reporters on international trips to tell stories of immigration, and maintain bureaus all over the country and world. Smith had a lot to share about the way journalism and state government has changed since the 1990s, and how some things have stayed the same or reemerged — like the name Cuomo.