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
Tag: Transparency
F. F, F, F, F, F, F and F. Those are grades you certainly wouldn’t want to bring home to your parents. Read More
Long Island’s towns and cities paid their workforce less in 2013 than in 2012, with payrolls totaling $692 million — a 4.7 percent decline from $726.5 million the previous year, a Newsday database shows. Read More
A total of 665 state and local government workers have permission to collect both a full-time salary and retirement payments, according to a new report. Read More
The Cayuga County Legislature Ways and Means Committee held a pair of spirited meetings last week regarding the proposed 2015 county budget. Much of the discussion centered around spending cuts, and specifically how expense reductions would translate into jobs eliminated. The county is facing tough financial times, and in order to balance the budget and set operations on a more stable path, some tough choices must be made. With that in mind, county officials should be doing all they can to share information about the budget with the public. What we've seen so far, however, has been minimal at best. Read More
Only a week after an Empire Center for Public Policy report gave many municipal websites a failing grade, New York state unveiled a new site of its own. Read More
It didn’t seem to surprise some local officials that their municipality’s website got a failing grade on a recent report card. Read More
More than 650 retired state and local government workers collecting a pension have also been authorized to earn a public salary before they're 65, according to a report by the Empire Center for Public Policy. Ten Nassau County employees and eight Suffolk County employees, mostly investigators in the district attorneys' offices, have received waivers from the state to go back to work, or "double dip," according to the database compiled by the nonprofit advocacy group. About three dozen other waivers to the state retirement law were granted for Long Island police departments, towns, and school districts. Read More