“This is an unsustainable model that gets more expensive year after year,” said Empire Center Executive Director Tim Hoefer. Read More
Tag: New York City
New York City’s public school custodians were paid an average of $109,467 in fiscal 2014, making them the city’s highest-paid group of municipal employees last year, according to newly released payroll data posted today at SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency website. Read More
Empire Center President E.J. McMahon joined John Gambling to talk about Mayor de Blasio's plan to roll back Bloomberg-era savings on student transportation. Read More
E.J. McMahon joined John Gambling to discuss New York City's decision to pay an extra $42 million to school bus drivers. Read More
Massive but partially hidden funding shortfalls are a feature, not a bug, of New York City's public pension system and its counterparts across the country. Read More
Mayor Bill de Blasio's 9-year contract agreement with the United Federation of Teachers, including a pair of 4 percent base-salary increases retroactive to the fall of 2008, will cost so much that he wants to defer some of the expense all the way out to the end of the decade. Read More
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has jumped on the bandwagon in favor of raising New York City’s top resident income tax rate — just a day after two undeclared 2013 mayoral candidates, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and then-City Comptroller William Thompson stepped (somewhat gingerly) off it. Read More
As public pension costs continue to rise, straining municipal budgets to the breaking point, New York City Comptroller John Liu has emerged as a stalwart defender of the status quo. Liu doesn’t deny that tax-funded pension costs are exploding; instead, he says the traditional defined-benefit system offers “a better bang for the buck.” Read More