MTA cops earn more OT on average than any other agency employees, according to records obtained by the Empire Center. Soaring overtime costs are partly to blame: MTA PD’s total OT bill topped $27 million in 2018, a 21 percent spike from 2017, the data shows. Read More
But Ken Girardin, a policy analyst for the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank, said the governor's action eliminates "any remaining illusion" that the state Public Service Commission — New York's primary utility watchdog — has been acting independently under the Cuomo administration. Read More
In September of 2019 the Empire Center’s Peter Murphy produced a white paper looking at this very issue. He provided a stunning list of examples of successful partnerships between businesses and schools. Read More
“It is very unusual to tax medicine in this manner; a lot of people using opioids are using them legitimately” said Bill Hammond, director of health policy at The Empire Center, a conservative-leaning think tank in Albany, N.Y. “To go after a specific class of drug like this, I don’t think anything like this has ever been done in New York.” Read More
The Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank based in Albany, analyzes public payrolls annually and posts rankings of individual compensation packages on its website, seethroughny.com. Last month, the center reported that more than 25 percent of teachers and administrators in school districts outside New York City received total compensation of more than $100,000 in 2018-19. Read More
Ken Girardin, a policy analyst for the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank, said the governor’s action eliminates “any remaining illusion” that the state Public Service Commission — New York’s primary utility watchdog — has been acting independently under the Cuomo administration. Read More
But who exactly will feel the pinch if Medicaid spending slows down or is reduced? Hospital groups already are mobilizing an effort to oppose any cuts, worried they could face the brunt of it. Still, health analyst Bill Hammond of the Empire Center says hospitals have seen an increase in funding from the program over the years. Read More
Our recent editorial on this waste cited the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin, who’d found used the agency’s own public filings to deduce a cost to electric ratepayers statewide of some $6 billion for just the first wave of wind farms NYSERDA is subsidizing off the Long Island coast, vs. the ageny’s claimed $1 billion. Read More