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More than 400 employees were paid at least $100,000 in overtime and 667 earned more in overtime than in regular pay. Read More

Every year for over a decade, the Empire Center has submitted Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the payrolls of MTA corporate subsidiaries. And in almost every Read More

Today’s news about criminal charges against five current and former MTA employees for alleged overtime fraud is a reminder that New Yorkers deserve to know how government spends every dollar. Read More

The Empire Center for Public Policy plans to take the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to court for allegedly violating the Freedom of Information Act for failure hand over payroll records of MTA cops to the government transparency group. Read More

The Empire Center for Public Policy today filed a lawsuit to force the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to disclose payroll records for MTA police officers that it withheld in violation of the state’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL). Read More

Predicting doom and gloom for New York is all the rage. While we do face difficult fiscal choices for the next several years, those with skin in the game are contradicting this “death of New York” narrative — and offering a way out. Developers across the city are asking communities for nothing more than regulatory permission to add jobs, mixed-income housing and new high-quality public spaces. Yet just this week, Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer denounced a multi-billion dollar investment in offices and homes in Long Island City — shortly after denouncing 2,700 new mixed-income homes in Astoria. Read More

Alfonso Castillo The financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is adding urgency to the agency’s efforts to curtail overtime numbers that critics say remain alarmingly high. The MTA said a Read More

Employee overtime at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) decreased by more than $100 million last year, according to payroll data posted today on SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s government transparency website. But while the $1.24 billion in overtime was 8 percent below the 2018 record level of $1.35 billion, it was still 46 percent higher than in 2014. Read More

#NYCoronavirus: The Legislature isn't just delegating emergency spending control powers to Governor Cuomo as part of the new state budget.  It's also handing him a deficit-financing credit card with an $11 billion limit. Read More

Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center, said that by continuing to bust its overtime budget, MTA officials “are not showing us that they can manage it in a way that is fiscally prudent." He noted that controlling overtime is especially important, given that it is factored into employees’ pension earnings. Read More

This year marks the 90th anniversary of New York State’s first Executive Budget, presented by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt in January 1929. Constitutional amendments establishing the Executive Budget process had been approved by New York voters in November 1927, capping a more than decade-long bipartisan effort to bring order to what had been a shambolic and fiscally profligate legislative budget process. Read More

Our MTA payroll summary was only the second most-viewed SeeThroughNY news release of 2019. To find out which of  transparency postings got the most attention this year, scroll through the list of the 2019 Top 10 SeeThroughNY press releases. Read More