The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME will have an especially dramatic impact in New York, home to the most highly unionized public sector in the country. Read More
Press Releases
The Cuomo administration has approved 2,740 capital grants for more than $1 billion in executive and legislative pork-barrel projects. Read More
The Empire Center has issued a 50th anniversary update of its seminal 2007 report on New York’s landmark Taylor Law, which governs labor relations in state and local government. Read More
Payroll data for 74,660 public authority employees, totaling $4.4 billion, have been added to SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s transparency website. Read More
Despite a concentration of world-famous hospitals in Manhattan, New York’s overall hospital industry ranks at or near the bottom on a range of performance benchmarks measuring quality, efficiency, financial health and equality of access, an Empire Center study has found. Read More
The Empire Center has posted sortable online databases of per-pupil spending and tax levy increases proposed in 2018-19 school budgets that will go to the voters next Tuesday, May 15. Read More
Nearly half of the 669 school districts seeking voter approval for budgets on Tuesday, May 15 are presenting spending plans that would increase property taxes as high as the 2011 property tax cap law allows, according to an analysis released today by the Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More
Benchmarking NY uses data from the state comptroller’s office to calculate effective tax rates–combined county, municipal and school taxes as a percent of market value–for thousands of localities across the state during 2017, excluding only New York City and Nassau County. Read More
The Empire Center has updated its online Spend-O-Meter to reflect the record size of New York’s newly enacted $168.3 billion budget for fiscal 2019. Read More
From 2014 to 2016, New York’s Medicaid program saw a surge in drug spending that Governor Andrew Cuomo blamed on “abusive” behavior by drug manufacturers. A new Empire Center issue brief shows that, after accounting for rebates, the surge was smaller than Cuomo described, and that it was mostly driven by enrollment growth. Overall, the report finds that price increases accounted for about one-fifth of the spending surge, while enrollment accounted for four-fifths. Read More
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) employees were paid an average of $99,654 in 2017, up about 1.7 percent from 2016, according to payroll data added today to SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s transparency website. Read More
The Empire Center today released its 2018 edition of “Checklist for Change,” a summary of more than 20 reforms needed to promote renewed economic growth and competitiveness in New York State. Read More