Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver may seek a pay hike for members of the New York State Legislature before the year is out, today’s New York Post reports. New York part-time lawmakers now make a base salary of $79,500 a year, plus $171 for every day in Albany and added stipends for leadership positions and committee chairmanships. Read More
OK—I admit it. Those protestors outside our pension reform event in Albany today did get one thing right. I do think people need to “gamble” some of their retirement savings on Wall Street. Read More
Assembly Democrats have introduced eight bills to sweeten pensions, the Citizens Budget Commission pointed out yesterday. Here’s a nice CBC chart summarizing those measures. By far the costliest, sponsored by Assemblymen Peter Abbate and William Colton of Brooklyn, would boost the salary “multiplier” used to calculate pensions for employees with more than 30 years service. Read More
Public pension funds in New York and across the country are continuing to rely on overly optimistic assumptions about their future investment gains, as detailed in a major New York Times story yesterday. Read More
Opponents of Governor Cuomo’s 2 percent property tax cap were able to stick one major exclusion into the legislation before it passed in 2011: a provision excluding a portion of local government and school employee pensions from the total allowable “levy limit” in years when taxpayer-funded employer contributions rise by more than two percentage points of salaries. Read More
The Cuomo administration reportedly is talking with labor leaders about tapping public and private pension funds to help pay for state infrastructure projects, including a multi-billion-dollar replacement for the Tappan Zee Bridge... Read More
In its look-back today on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s second legislative session, The New York Times quotes the governor as saying he had “front-loaded” the legislative calendar... Read More
Nicole Gelinas has a must-read op-ed in the New York Post raising questions about Governor Cuomo’s plan to rely on public-private partnerships (PPPs) to finance infrastructure and economic development projects in New York. Read More