Lawmakers want to create $5 million in new tax credits for TV and film directors and producers who work in New York — but only if they’re minorities or women. Read More
Category: Media Coverage
Mr. Hammond questioned Mr. Cuomo’s use of emergency regulations, which enables him to implement the regulations without a delay or public-commenting period. “I don’t think there’s an emergency here by any definition,” Mr. Hammond said. “Even if that law passed tomorrow, it doesn’t take effect until 2018,” he said, referring to an Obamacare replacement being considered by Congress. Read More
"It absolutely is working," said Kenneth Girardin, a spokesman for the Empire Center, said of the cap. In the four years following the implementation of the cap in 2012, the growth rate of school taxes statewide, excluding the big five city school districts, dropped by two-thirds, he said. Read More
“The numbers speak for themselves. The report doesn’t paint a dynamic picture of the New York state economy compared to other states,” said E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy. “After emerging from the 2007-2009 recession at a faster pace than the rest of the country — a product, in large part, of federal policies aimed at resuscitating Wall Street — the state has under-performed the national average in GDP growth every year since 2010,” added McMahon after reviewing the preliminary federal data. Read More
“A total of 313 school districts have proposed budgets setting property tax levies as high as the cap will allow — indicating that property taxes would have increased significantly more had the cap not been in place to deter them,” they said in the report. Read More
Ken Girardin, communications director for the fiscally conservative Empire Center, noted that lawmakers, like many public sector employees, also get benefits such as health and retirement pensions that substantially raise their actual earnings. Read More
As commuters suffer through constant delays caused by aging infrastructure, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority shelled out $971 million in OT last year — a 4% bump from the prior year and the highest amount since at least 2014, according to the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More
Empire Center executive director Tim Hoefer said that while overtime costs are unavoidable, they are also an indicator of how efficiently an organization is run. Read More