The Empire Center for Public Policy this week filed Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) appeals with the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) after six of its seven subsidiaries failed to release public payroll records. Read More
Tag: MTA
Overtime spending by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) last year reached a record $1.2 billion, a 20 percent increase over the 2016 level, according to data posted today on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s transparency website. Read More
New York City is among the highest-taxed cities in the U.S. The combined federal, state and local income-tax rate for individual filers making $1 million or more in New York City is 48.25% when taking into account deductions, said E.J. McMahon, founder and research director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a think tank based in Albany, N.Y. That rate, which doesn't include health care or Social Security taxes, would increase to about 48.57% under Mr. de Blasio's proposal. Read More
Over the past three years, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has reaped an unprecedented windfall of more than $10 billion in fines and penalties paid by major financial institutions for violating various state and federal banking laws. Coming virtually out of the blue, the windfall represented a unique opportunity to get ahead of the state’s most pressing problems — including but not limited to those of the transit system. It’s an opportunity Cuomo has mostly squandered. Read More
As commuters suffer through constant delays caused by aging infrastructure, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority shelled out $971 million in OT last year — a 4% bump from the prior year and the highest amount since at least 2014, according to the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More
Empire Center executive director Tim Hoefer said that while overtime costs are unavoidable, they are also an indicator of how efficiently an organization is run. Read More
"Overtime is an unavoidable cost for virtually any business or government agency, but those costs are an indicator of how efficiently an organization is run," said Tim Hoefer, the executive director of Empire Center. "For Metro-North, the continued growth of those costs gives taxpayers and riders a good reason to question whether they’re getting the most for their money." Read More
Eight employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) were paid more than $200,000 in overtime last year, part of a general surge in MTA overtime in 2016, according to data posted today on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s transparency website. Read More