It's a tale of four counties. On the surface, it should be the best of times for all four New York State counties closest to the city, which each enjoy household income levels well above the national median. Yet Nassau, Suffolk, and Rockland counties struggle financially while only Westchester County sails smoothly along a triple-A glide path. Read More
Call him Gov. No-Can-Do. Instead of fixing a problem he admits is throttling the state’s economy — i.e., high taxes — Andrew Cuomo makes excuses. The governor says he wants to take New York’s reputation as “a high-tax state and just explode it, once and for all.” Amen to that. But then he whines that Albany’s too broke to cut rates. Read More
ne out of every six police officers and firefighters retiring from state and local agencies outside New York City last year qualified for annual pensions of $100,000, according to state pension fund data posted at SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s government transparency website. The proportion of 2012 Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS) retirees with six-figure pensions–a total of 202 out of 1,225 individuals–was the largest ever, according to an Empire Center analysis of data stretching back to 2000. As in previous years, the proportion of Employee Retirement System (ERS) members qualifying for $100,000 was much smaller—just 80 out of a total of 17,156, or 0.5 percent. Read More
The state’s highest court will hear a case brought by a conservative think tank challenging the refusal of the state Teachers Retirement System to provide data about pensioners, the Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday. The Empire Center, an offshoot of the Manhattan Institute, filed suit last year when the TRS refused its Freedom of Information Law request for the data. The Empire Center publishes public spending data on its SeeThroughNY.net website. Read More
The state Court of Appeals said it would hear an appeal of the Empire Center for Public Policy’s case against keeping public pension information private. The fiscally conservative think tank in Albany sought an opinion from the state’s highest court after an appeals court in Albany ruled in February to keep private the details of teachers’ pensions. Read More
New York’s highest court appears set to correct some very bad judging by a passel of lower court jurists who haven’t a clue as to how read a law. If so, the Court of Appeals will come down on the side of the public’s ability to monitor how tax dollars are spent. Read More
There are two versions of the bill extending but tweaking the state’s binding arbitration law on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s website. The three-decade-old law, which sets the process for the settling of labor disputes between localities and their police and fire unions, was scheduled to sunset later this month. The governor was determined to see it customized to ensure that arbitration panels give greater weight to a locality’s “ability to pay” as well as to comparisons of contracts for similar communities and similar unions within the given locality. Read More
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to create a powerful new commission to investigate corruption in New York’s Legislature embarrassed by a string of indictments this year may, itself, violate law. The governor and Legislature also got blowback on a bill to be voted into law Friday aimed at helping taxpayers in municipal labor disputes, but which apparently gives a break to unions. Read More