Press Room

The headlines surrounding this week’s New York City budget naturally focused on #DefundthePolice demands. But for all its larger potential implications for New Yorkers’ security and quality of life, the partially illusory $1 billion “cut” in Read More

New York is finally ahead of the coronavirus, but its outbreak stands as a world-wide horror story. A sophisticated city was caught unprepared and suffered some of the worst levels of infection and death. The need for an investigation is clear. The h Read More

On April 2, with New York’s COVID-19 curve still rising ominously, state lawmakers  almost unchanged from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pre-pandemic January proposal. With the economy in a coma and revenues crashing, the plan obviously was awash in red i Read More

With the coronavirus lockdown continuing to erode tax revenues, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has turned up the volume on his demands for a federal bailout of the New York state budget. In a weekend briefing, the governor repeated his estimate that the Empire State will need help closing a deficit of $10 billion to $15 billion. “I don’t have any funding to do what I normally do,” he said. Read More

In case it wasn’t obvious from the headlines and body count, New York is currently suffering more severely from the coronavirus epidemic than almost anywhere else. Read More

Alfonso Castillo The financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is adding urgency to the agency’s efforts to curtail overtime numbers that critics say remain alarmingly high. The MTA said a Read More

Brian Pascus As New York begins to reopen from the Covid-19 lockd Read More

Stephen T. Watson This year's school elections were delayed and then shifted entirely to voting by mail thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, which also shut down schools here and across the country. District officials worried this new meth Read More

Eve Kessler The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s payroll ballooned by $150 million last year — a bad look when the agency is asking the federal government , including the . According to the Empire Center, a conservativ Read More

Caitlin Dewey Western New York’s regional “control room” meets by phone for as long as an hour each day, opening with a briefing from Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul before officials trade local updates, case numbers and complaints. The gr Read More

The 11 proposals, summarized in the table below, were submitted to Governor Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team at a public comment forum on Friday at the Albany Capital Center. The Medicaid Redesign Team, appointed Feb. 4, is tasked with finding $2.5 billion in Medicaid savings to balance the state budget due April 1. Consistent with Cuomo’s guidelines, Hammond’s proposals would have no impact on current beneficiaries or local governments. Read More

The state’s current fiscal challenge is caused by excess spending, not insufficient taxes.  The governor’s projection of PIT receipts—which apparently have recovered from the post-tax reform disruption in the final quarter of fiscal 2019—assumes a steady continuing uptick in revenues across the next four years, despite the continuing phase-in of significant “middle class” income tax cuts through 2025.   But this could prove overly optimistic. Read More

The proposed increase in the Excelsior Scholarship income cap would build on a program that was fundamentally flawed, wasteful and unfair to begin with. Read More

The main thing wrong with Governor Cuomo’s Medicaid budget is that it barely exists. His executive budget proposes to reduce funding for the state’s biggest and most important program by 10 percent, or $2.5 billion, but omits any plan for making that happen. Instead, the governor is delegating details to a panel of industry insiders who haven’t yet been named and don’t have a clear deadline. Read More

If ever a piece of legislation warranted thorough vetting, in full public view, it’s a bill that would compel 20 million people to switch health plans, abolish tens of thousands of jobs, upend a sixth of the economy and levy the largest tax increase in the history of this or any other state. Read More