As the clock ticks down towards Thursday’s adjournment of the state Legislature, Senate Republican leaders apparently are blocking a vote on a bill designed to ensure that the names of New York’s public pension recipients are (once again) unequivocally treated as public information. Read More
Thanks to a last-minute bill language tweak sought by police and firefighter unions, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s watered-down “reform” of New York’s compulsory arbitration law will not apply to a number of unsettled contracts that hadn’t even reached the arbitration stage before the law was extended just before the Legislature adjourned last month. Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) records now indicate that up to two dozen contract disputes may have been carved out of the new law (Ch. 67 of 2013), with the full impact ultimately depending on how many of these employers are considered fiscally distressed enough to otherwise qualify. Read More
Over at SeeThroughNY, our team works really hard to post fresh data quickly and accurately — when it’s available, that is. Read More
New York’s State Senate spent almost $45 million during the six-month period ending last September, according to the latest data available at SeeThroughNY, where the Empire Center for Public Policy maintains public records dating back to 2007. Read More
It seems like everyone who counts in Albany could get a pay bump before the year's out. Read More
Reversing decades of precedent, all but one of the state's public pension funds are now refusing to release the names of hundreds of thousands of retired employees who collect billions of dollars a year in taxpayer-guaranteed pensions. Read More
Gov. Cuomo's tax-hike package -- according to him -- is an "extraordinary benefit to the state ... that the state desperately, desperately needs to help turn around this economy." E.J.'s been covering all the reasons why and turn around "this eco Read More
The Governor's Spending and Government Efficiency (SAGE) Commission issued an overdue presentation to the Governor on December 15, 2011. Tucked away on , is one proposal the Governor needs to embrace with open Read More