With the ridiculous court decisions that have been made, the governor has unlimited, nearly unchecked power via the budget process. If you are happy or unhappy with anything, credit/blame needs to be directed at whomever the governor is from Spitzer forward.
For some reason I still don't quite understand, labor unions were viciously opposed to it, supposedly because they were afraid of losing their pensions.
That's the excuse they gave, but the real reason is simple. Labor unions already wield disproportionately massive power over the legislature in NY. Any attempt to reform NY government and hold elected officials more accountable to voters would inherently weaken some of their power, by comparison.
Labor unions don't want voters to have power for the same reason elected officials don't.
They actively spread misinformation, among other things telling people that the convention would have the power to adopt amendments. Any amendment would still have to go to a direct referendum anyway, so it's not like voters wouldn't have to explicitly approve the amendments. This referendum was about starting the process - arguing against it because lobbyists might propose something bad makes no sense, unless you also forbid the legislature from proposing constitutional amendments too.
And that's why "corporate interests and lobbyists" wouldn't use this process to propose amendments benefiting their own interests, because they already have the ability to do that, through the legislature. The point of the referendum is to balance this - every twenty years, voters are supposed to have an opportunity to check thr power of lobbyists and legislators directly. Since New York doesn't do ballot initiatives the way other states do, it's the only way for New Yorkers to vote directly on statewide policy like this.
In fact, this was literally the argument they used. "Why should we pay millions of dollars for a convention, when we already have a process for amending the constitution?" Of course, this argument conveniently omits the fact that the whole reason this referendum is required to be held every twenty years is to serve as a check against special interest groups capturing legislators... which is exactly what they've already done!
Given that Citizens United is a thing and that Bob Menendez somehow wasn't convicted in a pretty cut-and-dry bribery case, I don't think I want a constitutional amendment any time soon.
We could have voted to reform the constitution and then stayed engaged enough to pick independent delegates instead of the same old insiders catering to special interests. But we collectively let the insiders and special interests talk us out of our once in twenty years opportunity to fix this nightmare.