Eight employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) were paid more than $200,000 in overtime last year, part of a general surge in MTA overtime in 2016, according to data posted today on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s transparency website. Read More
Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio presented a fiscal 2018 Executive Budget that called for pension contributions totaling $9.6 billion — another all-time high. Yet city pension plans remain significantly underfunded even by lenient government accounting standards, posing a big risk to New York’s fiscal future. Read More
Click headline for data table. Read More
With a line-item veto last week, Governor Cuomo put a last nail in the coffin of a good idea that was never given a chance by Albany: analyzing the costs and benefits of health insurance mandates before passing them into law. Read More
From a New York perspective, the proposed repeal of itemized deductions for state and local tax payments was the (expected) headline item in the rough outline of a tax reform presented in Washington today by Trump administration officials. Read More
New York state, its local governments and public authorities are committed to spending tens of billions of dollars on public works in the next five to 10 years. But under current law, they’re also committed to wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on public works — to subsidize the above-market compensation of the state’s shrinking but politically influential construction unions. Read More
A new report card from the Leapfrog Group, a healthcare watchdog, paints an unflattering picture of safety in New York’s hospitals. Read More
The cost of publicly funded construction projects in New York is inflated up to 25 percent by the state’s outdated “prevailing wage” mandate, which requires contractors to pay workers the amounts required by union collective bargaining agreements, according to a report issued today by the Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More