The White House says that if an automatic budgetsequester is triggered in Washington later this week, New York ultimately will lose $275 million in federal aid. Read More
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Police and firefighter unions in New York have reaped a bonanza from the state law allowing them to insist on binding arbitration of their contract impasses. Read More
The statewide teachers union is celebrating a court ruling that, in contravention of long-established precedents, would allow the New York State Teachers Retirement System to treat the identities of its pension recipients as confidential information. The Empire Center will be seeking leave to appeal the case, as our director, Tim Hoefer, announced yesterday. Read More
The Empire Center for Public Policy will ask the state’s highest court to hear an appeal of a court ruling today that would allow New York State’s public pension funds to keep secret the names of pension recipients, the Center’s director, Timothy Hoefer, today announced. Read More
Assembly Democrats have introduced eight bills to sweeten pensions, the Citizens Budget Commission pointed out yesterday. Here’s a nice CBC chart summarizing those measures. By far the costliest, sponsored by Assemblymen Peter Abbate and William Colton of Brooklyn, would boost the salary “multiplier” used to calculate pensions for employees with more than 30 years service. Read More
You might think the union representing New York teachers would not favor weakening the source of its members’ future pensions. But you’d be wrong. Read More
To no one’s surprise, the statewide teachers’ union today filed suit to overturn New York’s local property tax cap. NYSUT has enlisted some parents of school children as co-plaintiffs, but the chief motive here is obvious: the tax cap is likely to limit future increases in teacher compensation, which is by far the largest category of local school expenditures. Read More
Kathy Marchione, 58, “retired” as Saratoga County Clerk before taking office as a state senator this year. That reportedly qualified her to start collecting a $66,000 pension—the equivalent of a job paying over $70,000 a year, after adjusting for the fact that pensions are not subject to payroll or state income taxes. Which is not too shabby, considering the average private sector pay in the Capital Region was just over $43,000 as of 2011... Read More