Reflecting the drop in overall inflation over the past year, the state-imposed cap on property taxes will be 1.66 percent for counties, cities, towns and villages with fiscal years that start Jan. 1, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office has informed local officials. Read More
A post on this blog three days ago passed along statistics interpreted here to mean that New York “is leading the nation in private and public jobs lost to layoffs.” But that passage turns out to have been seriously misleading, to say the least. Read More
Eliot Spitzer did some huge favors for the state’s largest public employee union when he was governor, so it’s no surprise that the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) has endorsed him in his race for New York City comptroller. Read More
Governor Andrew Cuomo has little hope of closing the state’s projected budget gaps over the next few years if he doesn’t continue to clamp a tight lid on state operations costs — and to that end, he’s pushing for the closure and consolidation of more state prisons and institutions for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled. Read More
Thanks to a last-minute bill language tweak sought by police and firefighter unions, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s watered-down “reform” of New York’s compulsory arbitration law will not apply to a number of unsettled contracts that hadn’t even reached the arbitration stage before the law was extended just before the Legislature adjourned last month. Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) records now indicate that up to two dozen contract disputes may have been carved out of the new law (Ch. 67 of 2013), with the full impact ultimately depending on how many of these employers are considered fiscally distressed enough to otherwise qualify. Read More
New York spent 2.6 times the national per-mile average on state highways — but had some of the worst road conditions in the country in the most recent year for which comparable federal data have been analyzed in the Reason Foundation’s 20th Annual Report on the Performance of State Highway Systems. Read More
New York comes in at number 35 on CNBC’s latest annual ranking of “Top States for Business.” This is down a tick from New York’s ranking on the same scale a year ago. Read More
Former Governor Eliot Spitzer is making a last-minute bid to get on the Democratic primary ballot for New York City comptroller. But, writing in the Daily News, E.J. says Spitzer’s record as governor “raises serious questions of his suitability for this particular job.” Read More
As argued in previous posts on this blog, Cuomo actually squandered a golden opportunity to deliver much more meaningful reform of the 39-year-old, repeatedly renewed but still temporary statute that has done much to drive police and firefighter compensation through the roof in New York. Read More
Effective July 1, some newly hired non-union employees of state and local government in New York will be able to opt into the same defined-contribution retirement plan that’s been available for nearly 50 years to faculty and staff of the State University of New York. Read More
When the city of Troy asked its Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA) employees to consider forgoing a 3.5 percent raise this year, a CSEA spokesperson said, "...we do not renegotiate our contracts. It's a moot point," ... Read More
In an effort to slash its liabilities, Stockton is notifying its employees that their retiree health insurance coverage is about to be cancelled. And, Nicole says, this is no coincidence Read More