Today, a watchdog group will go to court seeking government information that it’s clearly entitled to have – a list of retired city police officers and their taxpayer-financed pensions.
This appeal of a wrongheaded lower-court ruling must be successful. The public has a right to know how its money is spent.
The Empire Center, the Albany wing of the Manhattan Institute, runs a website called SeeThroughNY.net – an invaluable database of state and city government payrolls, contracts, legislative slush funds and pensions.
It tracks every tax dollar spent on personnel, from Mayor Bloomberg’s buck-a-year salary to the pay of teachers and dogcatchers statewide.
The same goes for pensions – with one glaring exception: NYPD retirees.
The Empire Center requested the info from the Police Pension Fund under the Freedom of Information Law. After a lot of hemming and hawing, the fund, defended by city lawyers, turned over a list of payouts collected by 44,370 pensioners – minus the names.
When the center sued for the names, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Carol Huff ruled in the fund’s favor – cluelessly suggesting “the common perception that retired police officers possess firearms” meant that “the possibility of such retirees becoming the target of burglaries is significant.”
Never mind that current officers’ salaries are already online. Or that pension data for every other retiree – including every other retired cop in the state – are already posted.
Huff’s decision sets a terrible precedent. Would upstate retired police officers demand similar pension secrecy? What about retired correction officers?
The information belongs to the public, your honors. Turn it over.
“The biggest problem for the state is the enormous, recurring structural budget gap starting next year and into the future,” said E.J. McMahon of the conservative-leaning Empire Center. “Cuomo clearly hopes that starting in 2021, (Democratic presidential candidate Joseph) Biden and a Democratic Congress will provide states and local government a couple of year’s worth of added stimulus. Read More
Ed McKinley
ALBANY — When the New York Constitution was reorganized nearly 100 years ago to give the governor more power over the budget process, noted there was a risk of making “the governor a czar."
M Read More
Michael Gormley
ALBANY — A new study by a conservative think tank says President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law gave most New Yorkers a tax cut, even as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo insists on repealing the measure because he says it will cost New Yo Read More
Johan Sheridan
ALBANY, N.Y. () — The Empire Center filed a against the state Department of Health on Friday.
“This case isn’t about assigning blame or embarrassing political leaders,” said Bill Hammond, the Empire Center’s Read More
The Empire Center first reported Tuesday that grants — 226 of them, totaling $46 million, to recipients selected by the governor and individual state lawmakers — seemed to still be going ahead. Read More
With lingering questions about how the novel coronavirus killed thousands of New Yorkers who lived in nursing homes, a group of state lawmakers is pushing to create an independent commission to get answers from the state Department of Health. Read More
“The importance of discussing this and getting the true facts out is to understand what did and didn’t happen so we can learn from it in case this happens again,” Hammond said. Read More
No doubt, the Health Department and the governor would like this report to be the final word on the subject.
But if it’s all the same with them, we’d still like a truly independent review. Read More