Urban progressives took over the New York state Senate in November, but the body’s biggest swing group will be suburban Democrats. These Democrats will need to prove themselves to their voters, many of them homeowners in places like Long Island and Westchester.
The most valuable deliverable for the nascent suburban caucus will be a permanent extension of Gov. Cuomo’s property-tax cap. [Read_more]
The state-city deal to bring one of Amazon’s two new headquarters to Long Island City might at least have provided New York City with another big benefit—a much-needed model of advanced, efficient building practices. After all, Amazon isn’t just a big corporation: It’s widely admired as a global leader in technological innovation.
Instead, it appears the deal will ensure that Amazon is saddled with the same arcane and outmoded construction-union work rules and compensation levels that have saddled New York City with the nation’s highest urban construction costs. [Read_more]
Some nonpartisan advice for Albany's Class of 2018 on how it can avoid getting sucked into the swamp—and maybe leave state government in better shape than they found it. [Read_more]
The debate about a proposed single-payer health plan for New York State has mostly focused on its potential cost. But far less attention has been paid to the radical impact it may have on hospitals and physicians across the state. [Read_more]
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s effort to campaign for re-election as a master builder of new infrastructure has been undermined by headlines about New York City’s crumbling subway system. Meanwhile, much less public and political attention is being paid to his management of another major transportation asset: the New York state highway system. [Read_more]
At stake is not only the quality of care for 20 million New Yorkers, but also the fate of a fifth of the economy and the livelihoods of 1.2 million health workers. [Read_more]
Unearthed videos of 1982 Cuomo-Lehrman debates: An example of how much (and, in some ways, how little) has changed in NY politics over the intervening decades. [Read_more]
This weekend, just days ahead of a primary that polls say he’ll win handily, Gov. Andrew Cuomo will take the wheel of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s refurbished 1932 Packard for a celebratory drive across the replacement for the old Tappan Zee Bridge. [Read_more]
The overarching scandal here wasn’t bid-rigging or the pay-to-play pattern in the developers’ contributions to the governor’s reelection campaign. At the root was a simply awful public policy — corporate welfare on steroids — that neither Cuomo nor most of his critics have definitively renounced, even now. [Read_more]
New York pushes more of its Medicaid expenses onto local government than any other state — an almost $8 billion cost-shift that contributes to high property taxes from Montauk to Niagara Falls. [Read_more]
This week’s US Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME was not unexpected — and neither was the agitated, high-volume reaction from Gov. Cuomo and the public-sector union bosses who are his strongest political allies. [Read_more]
