In 2014, the Empire Center created guidelines for what information local governments and school districts should make available on their websites—and found that most of the state's 500 largest municipalities and districts were not meeting that standard. Read More
"I think the narrative has gone askew as we talk about what to do about this," said Tim Hoefer, executive director of the government watchdog Empire Center for Public Policy. "We are one of the states with the highest property taxes in the nation, and the cost drivers are partially at the local level, but they're also driven by mandates from the states that aren't paid for." Read More
New York has seldom seen an executive initiative as politically radical or economically reckless as Gov. Cuomo’s proposal for a $15-per-hour statewide minimum wage. Read More
Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, argued that municipalities already have every incentive to streamline services and that little would be gained by "throwing more money at them" to do so. He also contended that unfunded state mandates are more to blame for high property taxes than the fact that New York has about 1,600 towns, villages, cities and counties. Read More
Police officers and firefighters in the city are among the highest paid government employees in the six-county Mohawk Valley region, according to a recent report by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit independent think tank based in Albany. Read More
Budget deficits papered over with borrowed money and fiscal gimmicks. Unaffordable union contracts. Pension contributions “amortized” into the future. Retiree health benefits promised but unfunded. Corruption probes and whiffs of scandal. Accountability blurred, responsibility shirked, and hard decisions avoided again and again. That litany could describe any number of old, declining American cities—including a few that, like Detroit, actually went broke. But the same dysfunction exists in affluent corners of New York’s archetypal suburb: Long Island Read More
The Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscal watchdog organization for New York state government at all levels, has put out its annual "What They Make" report for municipal employees, and the results seem to indicate that Auburn city workers are getting paid well. Read More
Amherst town police were the highest-paid group of local government employees north of the Mid-Hudson Valley, according to the Empire Center’s 2015 “What They Make” report. The town's 154 uniformed police officers were paid an average of $106,121. Read More