Blog

In a news conference just before yesterday’s legislative adjournment, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he would grant the required “messages of necessity” to pave the way for a vote on amended versions of two New York City bills — one related to condo-coop tax abatements, and the other to a measure implementing an important technical change in actuarial assumptions for the New York City pension funds. Read More

Just two school districts -- out of nearly 700 in New York -- will be limited to the new zero-tax hike contingency budget provision of the state's new property tax cap law next year. Read More

“Mandate relief remains elusive,” is one of the state-related headlines in today’s Albany Times Union — and that much, at least, is true. Unfortunately, the articlebeneath the headline repeats a familiar canard about the origins of the Triborough Amendment. Read More

As the clock ticks down towards Thursday’s adjournment of the state Legislature, Senate Republican leaders apparently are blocking a vote on a bill designed to ensure that the names of New York’s public pension recipients are (once again) unequivocally treated as public information. Read More

Nineteen school districts that attempted to override the tax cap in last month's school budget votes will present revised budgets to voters tomorrow. Nine of those districts are resubmitting budgets below the cap, seven have budgets at the cap and three districts will try again to override the cap. Read More

Perhaps the most consequential proposed legislation to fly almost completely under news media radar at the end of session has been a bipartisan bill that would amend and upgrade Kendra’s Law, which allows judges in certain situations to force people with serious mental illness to undergo treatment. Read More

Governor Andrew Cuomo understandably is touting a U.S. Chamber of Commerce study that ranks New York in tenth place for growth, productivity and livability among the 50 states. The governor said the Empire State had moved up 11 places from its position in last year’s “Enterprising States” study. Read More

Adding a fresh chapter to the seemingly never-ending saga of government excess and regulatory insanity, New York’s state Labor Department reportedly will use federal emergency funds to pay $51.71 an hour to temporary workers hired to clean up Poughkeepsie’s Fallkill Creek Read More

Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg (D-Long Beach) has just introduced a bill (A.10676) that would exclude court-ordered tax certiorari refund payments from Nassau County school district tax levy limits under the state’s property tax cap. It’s the same measure introduced in the Senate a month ago by Sen. Jack Martins (R-Mineola). Read More