A bill that state lawmakers said would increase transparency for where state money was going to community-based organizations was vetoed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo late last week.

The bill was aimed at requiring every state department, including the executive, to submit two annual reports on the distribution of funds and grants to community-based organizations — a requirement that Cuomo says is already being addressed.

Though the spigot has supposedly been turned off on these grants, Gannett ably demonstrates that the money continues to flow out of Albany.

In vetoing the bill, the governor said he supports the goals of the legislation, noting that he created the Project Sunlight website as attorney general. But he writes in the veto message that the measure is “unnecessary” because much of the information is already public available.

“In addition, anticipated future reports from the new Statewide Financial System, which is a single financial accounting record and central transaction processing system managed by the Division of Budget, will substantially address the reporting requirement under the bill,” Cuomo wrote, adding that the it is more efficient to use this system, then the one proposed by lawmakers.

Still, the timing of the veto is unfortunate as Cuomo tries to demonstrate that he’s more transparent than his predecessors (he doesn’t control when the Legislature sends him bills to act on).

The governor is sensitive to the idea that his administration has been anything but transparent in its first nine months. Cuomo introduced a website that publishes some details of his daily schedule and opened up the governor’s wing of the second floor of the Capitol.

And while a poll shows that the general public thinks Cuomo has kept up a similar level of transparency if not more so, the reporters who cover him would probably disagree.

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