Police officers and firefighters in the city are the highest paid government employees in the six-county Mohawk Valley region, according to this year’s payroll report released by the Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More
Category: Media Coverage
The Empire Center’s Tim Hoefer says the numbers caught their eye because the legal bills were much larger than what’s been typical in the past. Read More
Newly-released records show just how much state lawmakers are spending on outside attorneys. From October 1st of 2013 to this past March, the legislature spent more than $1 million. That’s according to a new report from the Empire Center. We spoke with the center’s Executive Director, Tim Hoefer about the numbers. Read More
In a release issued Thursday, the Albany-based think tank, the Empire Center for Public Policy, Inc., found the state Assembly paid out $657,629 to five different law firms during the most recent reporting period, while their colleagues in the Senate authorized another $418,574 for legal work. Read More
A far saner plan was laid out in a July 17 Daily News op-ed coauthored by liberal former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky and fiscally conservative watchdog E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy. The ideological odd couple proposed sinking the entire sum into transportation infrastructure, with half earmarked for chronically underfunded New York City-area mass transit and half for upstate roads and bridges. Read More
“Politicians playing to the basest instincts of voters don't make investments in existing infrastructure, they want to do new stuff, whether it's a new bridge or new iPads,” McMahon said. “They see much less payoff in the gritty infrastructure.” Read More
"All of this points back to the unsustainability of the state's pension system," said Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany-based think tank. Read More
E.J. McMahon, a state government analyst at the Empire Center, a conservative think tank, noted that the two sides didn't seem that far apart. The union asked for 17 percent raises over six years; the MTA, 17 percent over seven. They settled for 6.5 years. "It appears to have gone by script," McMahon said. "There clearly was not going to be a strike. I think what we saw in the last few weeks was a lot of theater." Read More