Twenty-seven* school districts were seeking to override the state's property tax cap in yesterday's school budget votes. Twenty of these districts -- or 74 percent -- failed to collect the needed 60 percent supermajority to pass, according to news accounts. The closest result was in the Cornwall School District in Orange County, which fell two votes short of an override supermajority. Read More
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
Given the Legislature's reputation for secrecy and scandals, Governor Cuomo is absolutely right to want it to open up its processes to public scrutiny -- in fact we've been saying the same thing for some years now. It would take little more than deleting four words from the Freedom of Information Law. Read More
Governor Andrew Cuomo needs to play a more active leadership role in responding to widespread reports of increasing fiscal distress among New York counties, municipalities and school districts, according to this Newsday commentary by the Empire Center's E.J. McMahon. 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