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
Unlike state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, who says he’s still thinking it over, one upstate local official has already concluded that Governor Cuomo’s local government pension smoothingproposal would be a bad deal. Read More
In lieu of actual mandate relief, Governor Cuomo wants to make a seemingly irresistible offer to local governments. Read More
Governor Cuomo today confirmed he’s following through on his State of the State promise to ban finger-imaging of Food Stamp recipients, over the objections of Mayor Bloomberg. Read More
“Mandate relief remains elusive,” is one of the state-related headlines in today’s Albany Times Union — and that much, at least, is true. Unfortunately, the articlebeneath the headline repeats a familiar canard about the origins of the Triborough Amendment. Read More
The White House says that if an automatic budgetsequester is triggered in Washington later this week, New York ultimately will lose $275 million in federal aid. Read More
The one promising new wrinkle in the upstate economic development plan unveiled today by Governor Andrew Cuomo is the offer of full (if impermanent) exemptions from state business and personal income taxes, as well as sales taxes, to firms that expand into designated Tax Free Zones at colleges, universities and “strategically located state-owned” properties. Read More
The report of Governor Cuomo’s Tax Reform and Fairness Commission is a useful, well researched collection of interesting and provocative ideas — some much better than others. Not a bad place to start a further exchange of ideas leading to a fruitful debate on the topic, assuming such a thing is possible in Albany. Read More