Media Coverage

Even enrollment at Saranac Lake Central School has declined 22 percent in the past decade, and the number of students enrolled in public schools statewide is the lowest recorded in 30 years, according to the Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More

Proposed changes to New York's so-called "free tuition" program should be taken off the table to allow lawmakers proper time to do their homework on the subject. Read More

New York's health insurance premium costs are surging at a rate higher than almost every other state in the nation. Read More

Groups like the Empire Center for Public Policy, a right-leaning fiscal watchdog, say that rising premium costs are linked to multiple issues, including the high cost of living, the number of unionized healthcare workers, and "heavy state taxes levied directly on health insurance." Read More

Data from Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany found that University at Buffalo football coach Lance Leipold was the sixth highest paid New York state employee for 2019. According to SeeThroughNY, Leipold made $663,500 total in 2019, the highest among all coaches at public universities in the state of New York. Read More

But fiscal watchdogs didn't see it that way. E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy, one of the fiscal monitoring groups at the Capitol Tuesday, said the Cuomo administration's leisurely way of releasing budget documents - including key pieces of legislation needed to pass to make up the fiscal plan's specifics - was a show of "contempt for the public, the taxpayers and the Legislature. Every year this process gets murkier and less transparent." Read More

“The Assembly’s whole theory on this is it’s not a spending problem, it’s a revenue problem,” said Bill Hammond, the director of health policy at the Empire Center, a conservative think tank. “The whole idea that you would use a carrot and stick to control Medicaid costs, I think it’s a nonstarter.” Read More

E.J. McMahon of the fiscally conservative Empire Center said the budget must reflect that the state has a spending problem, not a shortage of revenue. He said Cuomo can’t just “paper over” this year’s deficit by tapping reserves and employing gimmicks such as one-shot, nonrecurring revenues, but must institute long-term spending cuts and efficiencies in the budget so deficits don’t deepen in bad economic times. Read More

A report last year by the Albany-based Empire Center indicates that for fiscal year 2017-18, the Schenectady police force had the highest average pay at $94,817 for cities in the Capital Region and upstate New York, slightly above the statewide average. Read More

Albany-based think tank Empire Center attributed it in part to rising Medicaid enrollment, the minimum wage increase and a budget gimmick used earlier this year by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to delay paying Medicaid costs. Closing the gap in 2020 will likely require major cuts to medical services, or a plan to find enough savings elsewhere in the budget. Read More

Bill Hammond, health policy director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, offered a different take on the state's Medicaid spending. In a recent report, he pointed out the state, by 2016, was spending $3,236 per resident on its Medicaid program, 79 percent above the national average. Read More

Cuomo’s first MRT made “real progress” and could do so again, said Bill Hammond, director of health policy for the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank. But much depends on the team, Hammond said. “If it’s structured that same way, where the biggest recipients of Medicaid money are running the show, and the global cap has been weakened, and the governor’s political capital on this issue is diminished, the question is how effective will that be,” he said. Read More