Tag: Transparency

Taxpayers continued shouldering costs for Sheldon Silver’s legal defense in the months after he stepped down as Assembly speaker, according to the latest Senate and Assembly expenditure data added to SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center’s transparency website. Read More

Teachers, principals, superintendents and other public school employees in the Capital Region who retired last year with at least 30 years of service earned an average pension of $60,466, according to new data from the Empire Center. Read More

New York’s Legislature has been exempt from many provisions of the state Freedom of Information Law since FOIL was first enacted in 1974. The Assembly and Senate ultimately decide how much legislative information to make public. This makes about as much sense as putting Cookie Monster in charge of security at the Chips Ahoy factory. As a result, a lot of information on legislative matters ranging from individual employee timesheets to a billion-dollar slush fund has been concealed from taxpayers. But if Governor Cuomo has his way, that could soon change. Read More

The new ruling stems from the Albany-based Empire Center’s Freedom of Information Law request in 2014 seeking the names of people receiving pensions through the New York City Employees’ Retirement System. Read More

The number of state employees making more than $100,000 a year jumped eight-percent last year from the year before. Read More

The New York City Employee Retirement System (NYCERS) must provide the Empire Center with names and amounts of pensions paid to retired New York City uniformed employees, such as corrections officers, a Kings County Supreme Court judge ruled today. Read More

Police officers and firefighters in the city are among the highest paid government employees in the six-county Mohawk Valley region, according to a recent report by the Empire Center for Public Policy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit independent think tank based in Albany. Read More

The complete 2015 New York state government payroll is now posted on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency website. Read More