Overtime payments jumped nearly 16 percent last year at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), fueling agency-wide average pay hikes of 6 percent, according to newly posted payroll records at SeeThroughNY.net. The increase in MTA payroll costs for 2018 alone was $418 million—$82 million more than the authority expects to raise annually from its latest round of fare, ticket and toll hikes. Read More
In a turnabout from recent trends, downstate New York’s population decreased twice as fast as upstate’s last year, according to the latest Census Bureau annual estimates. Read More
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has apparently doubled the price tag of her Medicare buy-in proposal, from 4 percent of income to 8 percent – but the math still does not add up. Read More
By midnight Monday, more than 9 million New Yorkers will have filed their income tax returns for 2018. And most will then have cause to wonder what the Great New York SALT Panic of 2018 was all about. Read More
The Empire Center for Public Policy this week filed Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) appeals with the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) after six of its seven subsidiaries failed to release public payroll records. Read More
The new state budget features a larger-than-usual increase in Medicaid spending and two new coverage mandates for private insurers – adding to the already steep costs of health care for New York's taxpayers and policyholders. Read More
The hastily approved raise for New York’s governor had an unintended consequence: sweetening the Tier 6 pension plan enacted in 2012 and saddling taxpayers with an untold amount of higher pension costs. Read More
The Empire Center has updated its online Spend-O-Meter to reflect the record size of New York’s newly enacted $175.5 billion budget for fiscal 2020. Read More