Instead of a gold watch, more and more teachers are getting gold-plated pensions when they retire. The number of retirees earning six-figure pensions from the city and state teacher retirement systems nearly tripled during the past five years, according to a report from the Empire Center for Public Policy released Thursday. Read More
New York's top economic development agency isn't releasing enough information to determine whether billions of dollars are being misspent. Read More
This fall, the Empire Center for Public Policy released its first evaluation of websites for the state’s 500 largest counties, municipalities, and school districts — and gave 85 percent of them failing grades. In the Enterprise coverage area, three were evaluated: The county of Albany and the town of Guilderland both got Fs while the Guilderland Central School District earned a C. Read More
Have a complaint about uncollected trash or a noisy neighbor? New York City has an app for that. Want to know if the streets you’re about to travel to work have been plowed? Chicago has an app for that. Read More
Showing contempt for the public — if not also for the courts — retirement funds representing the city’s cops and firefighters are stonewalling a judicial order to make public the names of all their pensioners. Read More
When the Empire Center posted a list on its website of the 665 public employees “double dipping” — or collecting public sector pensions while getting paid for other public sector jobs — Herkimer County’s Dr. Vinay Patil emerged as one of the highest-paid at $210,000 annually. Read More
The failing grades given local government websites by the Empire Center for Public Policy shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s tried to use them. Read More
The Empire Center for Public Policy is seeking to intervene in a lawsuit initiated by New York City firefighter unions in an attempt to block the release of pension recipients’ names alongside individual pension benefit amounts. Read More