The state spent $25 million for a shopping mall in Staten Island and $100,000 for a skateboard park in the city of Albany. They were two of the more than 500 pet projects funded with a secret slush fund, according to the Empire Center. The watchdog group said it's like the Oprah syndrome where everyone got a car on the show. Read More
The pork may be returning to the state budget. State lawmakers and Gov. Andrew Cuomo quietly have stashed away $1.2 billion for pet projects, and they are starting to spend it: about $187 million for 588 projects across New York, a report from the Empire Center, a watchdog group in Albany found. Read More
State leaders are planning to borrow $5 million to help CBS pay for renovations at the Ed Sullivan Theatre, the home for the "Late Show with Stephen Colbert," according to state records. That means state taxpayers are on the hook for $5 million, plus interest. Read More
A fiscal watchdog group says it’s uncovered what it calls a “secret slush fund”, used by Governor Cuomo and state legislators to fund pet projects around the state, but the governor’s budget office says the grants are subject to oversight. Read More
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will pay the legal fees for a fiscally conservative think tank after admitting it was slow to respond to a public records request. Read More
The state Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Empire Center for Public Policy have reached an out-of-court settlement in which the MTA acknowledges its failure to respond “in a timely manner” to the Center’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request. Read More
Gov. Cuomo’s payment of $16 million to keep CBS’s “The Late Show” in New York, when there was zero real threat of it leaving, is the kind of boondoggle Stephen Colbert might mock in his monologue — if he weren’t the one cashing the check. But that gratuitous giveaway of tax dollars, announced last year, turns out to have been the tip of a very big and ugly iceberg. Read More
Working for the MTA is the fast track to a six-figure salary. One in four Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees made $100,000 or more in 2014, according to payroll data released by the Empire Center Thursday. Read More