The Empire Center for New York State Policy, a government watchdog group, is seeking to overturn mid-level appeals court rulings that blocked the release of information about how much money individual public employees were receiving from their taxpayer-funded pension funds. Read More
Cities and taxpayers have to decide what’s the best way to utilize tax dollars, said Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center. “I think generally speaking … in a perfect world, overtime is the result of extraordinary circumstances or poor management,” he said. “It’s about right-sizing government.” Read More
The Empire Center for Public Policy has been in a legal battle for years with several public pension systems after lower courts ruled starting in 2011 that the names of pensioners do not need to be made public. Read More
"The point of the FOIL and the transparency movement in general is not to be punitive to the municipalities, but to make this data which should be open to the public, open to the public without being a burden," said Tim Hoefer, director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a conservative think tank that runs SeeThroughNY.net. That website offers a searchable database of public salaries as provided by the state retirement system. Read More
Curious how much the government worker next door makes? For information that is lacking in the state’s websites—namely, public salaries—nonprofit groups, such as the Albany-based Empire Center for Public Policy, compile the info into searchable online databases. Their website,SeeThroughNY allows users to search public employee salaries, pensions, contracts and other info for various levels of government. Read More
In total, the state's multiple levels of government burn through more than $190 billion a year from their own revenue sources, mainly taxes. Another $60 billion comes the federal government - which has its own claim on our wallets. But where does it all go? Thanks to the digital revolution, anyone with access to the Internet can begin to find some answers to that question. Read More
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