Tim Hoefer, the executive director of the Empire Center, talked to City & State about the organization's SeeThroughNY web site, which posts a wealth of financial and budgetary data online in an attempt to improve government transparency and inform New Yorkers about how their tax dollars are being spent. Read More
The proposed $600 million new public health lab on the Harriman State Office Campus would be state-of-the-art, built on state land and house as many as 600 public employees. Read More
In 2008, around the time the Empire Center launched its transparency website SeeThroughNY, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli was moving on the same track with the creation of OpenBookNewYork. Read More
Governor Cuomo today marked Sunshine Week by launching Open New York, a really cool portal for finding government data online -- without having to file a Freedom of Information Law request. The site launched with 267 data sets populating it. That's a respectable number, but a fraction of what could eventually be on the site. Read More
Given the Legislature's reputation for secrecy and scandals, Governor Cuomo is absolutely right to want it to open up its processes to public scrutiny -- in fact we've been saying the same thing for some years now. It would take little more than deleting four words from the Freedom of Information Law. Read More
Reversing decades of precedent, all but one of the state's public pension funds are now refusing to release the names of hundreds of thousands of retired employees who collect billions of dollars a year in taxpayer-guaranteed pensions. Read More
The Charlotte Valley School District in Delaware County had a tough employment situation on their hands until just last week. Former building principal Edgar Whaley had been a focus of controversy — going back at least a year. But that’s all settled now, thanks to a secret, lucrative contract settlement passed by the school’s board of education late last week. Read More
Let's make a deal - you give me $650 today, and five years from now I'll give you $10,000 back. That incredible return on investment is what some forward-thinking federal agencies are taxpayers, according to the National Archives and Records Admin Read More