At the beginning of the 2006 legislative session, all members of the State Senate and Assembly received "Ahead of the Curve," The Business Council's 2006 agenda for promoting innovation and improving the state's business climate. This document discussed the most critical jobs issues facing the state, as identified by Business Council member companies, and served as the basis for our 2006 scorecard. As the legislative session unfolded, we monitored action on specific legislation linked to those priorities — some of them bills we believe would have helped New York's job growth, and some of which we believe would have hurt us. (For a list of 2006 bills and a description of each, click here.)

The Vote for Jobs Index is based on each legislator's action (or non-action) on each of those issues. Voting for a bill The Business Council favors (or against one The Business Council opposes) yields a score of +1 on that issue; a score of -1 results if a legislator votes against a bill the Council favors, or for a bill the Council opposes. Additional points (both + and -) may be assigned for legislators who take a leadership role for, or against, pro-jobs priorities. An overall 2006 score was developed for each legislator on the issues, and a letter grade was assigned to each legislator's record. (For more details on exactly how the rating system works, click here.)

Importantly, the Vote for Jobs Index includes non-action in the rating system. Many pro-business bills are simply never allowed to come to a vote in one or both houses of the Legislature — so no votes on them are ever recorded. For anybody who wants to track the action of individual legislators, this presents a dilemma: How do you rate votes, when there are no votes? Whether by accident or by design, this system of non-action has for years enabled legislators to avoid personal accountability on many issues.

The Vote for Jobs Index brings accountability to the system by taking the position that non-action is an action, and will be rated. If a legislator has not voted on an issue, she or he is rated a "0" on that issue — regardless of whether the reason for the non-vote was absence, or that the leadership bottled the bill up in committee and refused to bring it to the floor.

One final point: Vote for Jobs New York is not intended to endorse, or oppose, individual legislators for re-election. Individual voters, as well as interested organizations, will have a range of criteria they consider in weighing the question of whether an individual lawmaker should, or should not, be returned to Albany. We believe the legislator's voting record on issues with an impact on jobs should be one of those criteria — but there may be others of equal, or greater, importance to you. Our purpose is simply to give you one more tool to use in holding your elected representatives accountable.