Tim Hoefer

Governor Cuomo today marked Sunshine Week by launching Open New York, a really cool portal for finding government data online -- without having to file a Freedom of Information Law request. The site launched with 267 data sets populating it. That's a respectable number, but a fraction of what could eventually be on the site. Read More

Just two school districts -- out of nearly 700 in New York -- will be limited to the new zero-tax hike contingency budget provision of the state's new property tax cap law next year. Read More

Nineteen school districts that attempted to override the tax cap in last month's school budget votes will present revised budgets to voters tomorrow. Nine of those districts are resubmitting budgets below the cap, seven have budgets at the cap and three districts will try again to override the cap. Read More

It seems like everyone who counts in Albany could get a pay bump before the year's out. Read More

Reversing decades of precedent, all but one of the state's public pension funds are now refusing to release the names of hundreds of thousands of retired employees who collect billions of dollars a year in taxpayer-guaranteed pensions. Read More

The New York Times has agreed to print a correction of this article about the minimum wage issue, which includes inaccurate information implicitly attributed to Empire Center senior fellow Russell Sykes. Read More

Forty-nine school districts* were seeking to override the state's new property tax cap in yesterday's school budget votes. Of those, our review of regional media coverage suggests 30 districts* passed an override, while 19 districts voted their budgets down. Seven of the proposed overrides failed to collect even 50 percent of the vote. Read More

The Charlotte Valley School District in Delaware County had a tough employment situation on their hands until just last week. Former building principal Edgar Whaley had been a focus of controversy — going back at least a year. But that’s all settled now, thanks to a secret, lucrative contract settlement passed by the school’s board of education late last week. Read More