The only school district in Western New York to be operating on a contingency budget for the upcoming school year granted its superintendent a pay raise and new benefits... Read More
Tag: Taxes and Spending
E.J. McMahon surveys New York city’s tax burden, which has increased mightily under Mayor Bloomberg... Read More
Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned last week that if New York City fails to control unsustainable employee compensation costs, it could find itself trapped in the same "downward cycle" as bankrupt Detroit... Read More
Local governments had hoped for an overhaul this year to the controversial binding arbitration process, including a 2 percent cap in the awards. But what they got were small changes in the 39-year-old system for resolving disputes in local police and firefighter contract negotiations. Read More
Sometime before midnight Wednesday, without fanfare or ceremony, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed measures that extended or increased local sales tax levies in nearly two dozen counties around the state. Read More
A new program to extend tax-free benefits to certain businesses caused the state to downgrade its revenue projections by $323 million through March 2017, according to new estimates from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget office. The program, known as START-UP NY, allows businesses to avoid paying taxes for up to 10 years if they create jobs and locate near participating college campuses. Read More
New York's mayoral candidates have paid surprisingly little attention to one issue that really sets the Big Apple apart: an extraordinarily heavy tax burden. No other big city in the country imposes such a broad array of taxes at such high levels, piling its own levies on top of those collected by Albany. For example, corporations pay a combined rate of 17.5 percent on net income allocated to New York City, roughly double the average in most of the country. At the same time, the city's property tax is engineered to fall most heavily on commercial property and apartment buildings -- contributing to sky-high rents in both categories... Read More
It's no secret the county budget is tight. Accounting for roughly 1 percent of the budget is the base salary of the top 25 highest-paid county employees. Chautauqua County has a 2013 budget of roughly $230 million. According to numbers gathered from See Through NY, the total base pay for those 25 employees was $2,338,008 in 2013. The number is a 2.8 percent increase over the base pay for the 25 highest-paid county employees in 2012. It is an 8.4 percent increase from 2009. Read More