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"Wall Street Recovering Faster Than Anticipated" is the headline on today's press release from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's office, heralding a that points to potential record-breaking profitability and lower-than-expected employment losses a Read More

Senate Democrats are "secretly considering" up to $1 billion in "new taxes on medical services" as an alternative to health care spending cuts in Governor Paterson's deficit reduction plan, according to in today's New York Post. Such a t Read More

Four days after proposing to slash the salaries of 350 Harrison town employees by 20 percent, Supervisor Joan Walsh was re-elected supervisor by voters in the affluent Westchester County suburb. With the town facing a budget gap between $3.3 milli Read More

Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a major settlement with J.P. Morgan Securities concerning the fascinating municipal-corruption case of Jefferson County, Alabama. Under the deal, J.P. Morgan, which doesn't admit or deny any Read More

In their weekly outlook, Municipal Market Advisors (MMA) tries to dampen the hysteria over a "coming municipal market collapse," saying that although "state and local credit quality is undeniably getting worse," we're unlikely to see mass-scale muni Read More

in today's New York Post explains why—and how—the Paterson administration should declare a fiscal emergency and seek to impose a three-year freeze on all state and local employee salaries in New York.  This would save taxpayers statewid Read More

Gov. Paterson told radio host John Gambling this morning that although arbitrators in the MTA-TWU case "probably made the correct ruling technically" to give transit workers 11.3 percent raises over three years because the rest of the city's labor u Read More

When this year's state budget was first enacted back in April, the budget gap for fiscal 2010-11 was at $2.17 billion.  The in July more than doubled this estimate, to $4.62 billion.   And today's says next year's gap has grown by another 47 per Read More

The Journal News has posted the annual pensions of 335,648 retired state and local government employees in a searchable data base (). Included are retirees of the Common Retirement Fund, which covers employees of state agencies and loca Read More

  reported this morning that "independent" arbitrator John Zuccotti, who was supposed to represent the public in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's contract with the Transport Workers Union, planned to donate his $116,000 fee -- at $900 a Read More