Schools, excluding the Big 5 districts of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Yonkers and New York City, are proposing to increase taxes by $539 million despite an enrollment drop of 7,827 students, or a 0.5% decline, the Empire Center for State Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank said. Read More
The 2011 tax cap law, that would have expired in 2020, was made permanent this year. It limits the annual growth in property tax levies to 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is less, and with certain exclusions for each district. The fiscally conservative Empire Center says the law has saved New Yorkers billions of dollars in municipal and school tax payments. Read More
New York's spending on elementary and secondary education reached a record $23,091 per pupil in 2017, once again topping all other states in this category, according to the latest U.S. Census data. Read More
E.J. McMahon, who served as a deputy tax commissioner in the administration of former Gov. George Pataki and now is the research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank, said STAR has always been about fiscal gimmickry and is going further in that direction. “It would have been a better idea to simply freeze the STAR benefit rather than sneakily convert it into a credit,” he said. Read More
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"Readers will recall that the Empire Center is the think tank that spent months trying to pry Covid data out of Mr. Cuomo’s government, which offered a series of unbelievable excuses for its refusal to disclose...five months after it sued the government, and one week after a state court ruled that the Cuomo administration had violated the law and ordered it to come clean—Team Cuomo finally started coughing up some of the records." -Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2021SIGN UP TO STAY UP TO DATE ON THIS AND THOSE OTHER ISSUES THAT IMPACT NEW YORKERS.