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One of New York State’s most respected public policy experts has joined the staff of the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Russell Sykes will be a full-time senior fellow at the Albany-based Empire Center, focusing on human services programs, Medicaid policy and reform of state mandates on local governments.

Sykes joins a professional team that includes Timothy Hoefer, director of the Empire Center, E.J. McMahon, senior fellow, and Robert Scardamalia, the Center’s data consultant and former state data director.

“Rus adds broad knowledge and extensive policy-making and policy development experience to the Empire Center,” Hoefer said. “Over the past six years, the Empire Center has become an intellectual force to be reckoned with in New York’s public policy debates, and Rus will allow us to expand our research agenda to include new ideas and analysis on topics ranging from entitlement reform to mandate relief.”

Sykes was most recently Deputy Commissioner for the Center for Employment and Economic Supports (CEES) for New York’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance (OTDA). In that role he was responsible for policy development, federal, state and local relations and the oversight of many of New York’s major income support programs.

Prior to joining OTDA in 2004, he was Vice President of the State Communities Aid Association (now known as the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy), managing their policy portfolio in economic security which included not only the programs listed above, but also low income tax policy, child care, aspects of Medicaid and budgetary/fiscal analysis. He was the major architect of New York’s Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) legislation enacted in 2004 and subsequently expanded to become, in aggregate, the largest state EITC in the nation.

From 1994 to 2003, Sykes was also an elected member of the Board of Education in the Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk Central School District south of Albany, where among other things he was a principal negotiator of one four-year contract and also served on the curriculum and instruction and school finance committees.