"How to Build a $3.4 Billion Bridge in Record Time" is the title of a scheduled discussion featuring Howard P. Milstein, chairman of the state Thruway Authority, at an upcoming Crain's NY forum on infrastructure issues. In fact, work on the New NY Bridge is still in the pile-driving stages, and no one can say whether even the first of the two spans will be completed on schedule in two years, much less whether the whole thing will come in on budget. Read More
Employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) make a good buck, and six-figure cash compensation in 2013 was by no means limited to the white-collar higher-ups, according to 2013 payroll records posted at SeeThroughNY today. Read More
Governor Andrew Cuomo, who already signed into law one increase in New York’s statewide minimum wage, has agreed to support raising the minimum another notch and giving localities the discretion to go even higher — all reportedly as a condition for receiving the endorsement of the labor union-dominated Working Families Party (WFP). Read More
"Uneven growth" in U.S. factory jobs since the recession is the subject of a front-page article in today's Wall Street Journal--and upstate New York is featured as a prime example of a region left behind by the positive trend. Read More
The cities of Buffalo and Niagara Falls continued to lose population between 2010 and 2013, according to the latest U.S. Census estimates, and the Buffalo-Niagara Falls metro area created jobs at less than half the national rate in the past year, Labor Department data show. But never fear: state and local pols are riding to Western New York’s rescue with a sure-thing ”catalyst of economic growth.” It’s … a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills. Read More
A post on this blog three days ago passed along statistics interpreted here to mean that New York “is leading the nation in private and public jobs lost to layoffs.” But that passage turns out to have been seriously misleading, to say the least. Read More
Public employee unions can’t invoke the Triborough Amendment to preserve old pension plans that did not require employee contributions, the state Court of Appeals held in two cases this week. The rulings, favoring management in the cities of Yonkers and Oswego, were a solid win for taxpayers. Read More
New York State’s enacted budget and New York City’s proposed budget for fiscal 2015 both project that welfare cash assistance caseloads will decline in the year ahead. Since the city accounts for nearly two-thirds of the state caseload, those trends are closely related. Read More