Heightened concerns about the railroad’s overtime spending followed an MTA payroll report issued last week by the nonprofit Empire Center for Public Policy that revealed the authority’s top earner in 2018 — LIRR chief measurement officer Thomas Caputo — took home $344,147 in overtime, on top of his $117,499 salary. Read More
“Upstate would need to do a really significant reset of the way government is funded and what it spends, and upstate politicians have not exactly been clamoring for the reforms that it would take to make that happen,” said E.J. McMahon of the Albany-based Empire Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank. Read More
There has also been declining enrollment at New York's public colleges, mainly at its community colleges. At public schools, the 2.6 million students is the lowest in nearly 30 years, according to the Empire Center for New York State Policy. Read More
The New York Post reported Thursday that MTA Chairman Patrick Foye has ordered a "crackdown" at the authority to address overtime abuses. Data released earlier this week by the Empire Center, a fiscal watchdog, found that the MTA's employee overtime payments climbed nearly 16% last year. The data showed one Long Island Rail Road employee, the recently retired chief measurement operator Thomas Caputo, made $344,147 in overtime plus his annual salary, bringing his total compensation to $461,646. The overtime spending came during a year in which the LIRR had its worse on-time performance percentage in nearly two decades at 90.4%. Read More
Despite a year fraught with delayed, canceled and stalled trains, as well as the seventh fare hike in less than a decade, a new study released by Empire Center found that MTA’s overtime rose by nearly 16 percent last year. Read More
New figures from the Empire Center show overtime at the MTA spiked more than $100 million in 2018, to $1.3 billion. The Long Island Rail Road proved the biggest gravy train, ladling out $224 million in OT, up nearly $50 million from the prior year’s $175 million. Read More
The agency’s payroll grew by a whopping $418 million in 2018, according to a report published Tuesday by the watchdog group Empire Center for Public Policy. Their findings are compiled into a searchable database, which shows exactly how much each of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 80,000 employees raked in last year. Read More
After the Empire Center’s SeeThroughNY noted this week that the LIRR shelled out $224.6 million for overtime in 2018 — up nearly $50 million from the previous year and more than $115 million since 2013 — it sounded alarms at the highest levels of the MTA’s management. Read More