GOODER AND HARDER, NEW YORK: Albany’s business as usual with Hochul continuing the pay-to-play corruption.

The Times Union’s Bragg has performed a remarkable public service, illuminating Albany influence-peddling at the retail level, and underscoring the ethics deficit that has informed Kathy Hochul’s Albany tenure.

She was a second-tier player in Western New York when Andrew Cuomo — the prince of Albany pay-to-play — picked her for lieutenant governor in 2014. Whereupon two things swiftly happened: Her husband Bill, a former federal prosecutor with no obvious relevant experience, was named general counsel to Buffalo-based casino-entertainment giant Delaware North — and Delaware North began lobbying the lieutenant governor’s office.

Subsequently, Hochul engineered an $850 million taxpayer-funded cash bath for a pro football stadium in Buffalo — a deal from which, serendipitously or otherwise, Delaware North stands to make a bundle as the stadium’s concessions holder.

None of this appears to have been illegal, so perhaps it’s just further evidence of the Hochul administration aiming to serve — whomever.

But it’s definitely the Albany way. There’s so much discretionary “economic development” money floating around the capital city that shenanigans are inevitable. The second-most-powerful man in the Andrew Cuomo administration went to prison for development-related bribe-receiving. Plus federal prosecutors spent much of the former governor’s tenure probing look-alike schemes and scams up and down the Mohawk River-Hudson River corridors.

Hochul lived through much of this, so one would think she’d be sensitive to the optics of ethical corner-cutting — if not to its actual substance.

One would be wrong.

Earlier: New York Democrats Undermine Supreme Court 2nd Amendment Ruling In New Legislation.

As always, coastal Democrats party like it’s 1859.