The Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) litigation of 1993-2006 established the principle that New York State is constitutionally obligated to ensure funding of a “sound, basic education” for pupils in New York City schools. Today, the state’s highest court cleared the way for a lawsuit claiming that funding levels for about a dozen of New York’s small city school districts doesn’t meet that requirement. Read More
If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it 100 times: the average annual benefit paid by the state pension system in 2011 was $19,151 — “not a big amount for someone whose [sic] gave a lifetime of service,” as the Public Employees Federation (PEF) puts it in a letter and blast fax to state legislators. Read More
AFSCME, the nation’s biggest public-sector labor union, is mounting a statewide ad campaignclaiming that “politicians in Albany” want to “cut the pensions of firefighters, teachers and nurses by 40 percent.” Read More
In a classic end-of-session rush job, the Assembly and Senate last week passed a bill that will make it easier to sue New York State’s local governments. Read More
Perhaps the most consequential proposed legislation to fly almost completely under news media radar at the end of session has been a bipartisan bill that would amend and upgrade Kendra’s Law, which allows judges in certain situations to force people with serious mental illness to undergo treatment. Read More
The slow-motion process of developing state regulations to allow natural gas hydro-fracking in upstate New York seems to have reached stall speed, now that Governor Andrew Cuomo has ordered up a new health impact review that could force the Department of Environmental Conservation to miss a Nov. 29 deadline for issuing fracking rules. Read More
The weekly City and State opens its feature on the minimum wage issue with a portrait of Michelle Dawkins, who rises at 2:30 a.m. to earn $7.25 an hour ferrying wheelchair-bound passengers among the terminals at JFK airport. Assuming she is able to work 40 hours a week without a sick day, Dawkins “will make $15,080 over the course of a year,” the article says. Read More
Recent trends on Wall Street indicate that public pension funds with fiscal years ending June 30 probably missed their rate-of-return targets for 2012. I delve into one plan in particular — the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System — on the editorial blog at Newsday. Read More