The New York Power Authority (NYPA) could be taking the money-losing state Barge Canal off the back of the Thruway Authority under the fiscal 2017 state budget that will be proposed today by Governor Andrew Cuomo. Assuming this Buffalo News report is true, it would explain how Cuomo intends to finance his proposal to freeze Thruway tolls for five years even while building the $4.8 billion Tappan Zee Bridge replacement. Read More
The recent collapse of Health Republic Insurance—disrupting health coverage for 215,000 state residents, and leaving doctors and hospitals with upwards of $200 million in unpaid claims—should have been cause for soul-searching at the state Department of Financial Services (DFS). Instead, based on the department’s first extensive public comments on the issue, given at a legislative panel last week, DFS officials seem to be in denial about their role in the demise of Health Republic, the largest non-profit health insurance cooperative set up three years ago under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Read More
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments today in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, and the stakes couldn’t be higher for New York’s politically powerful public-sector unions. Read More
Gov. Cuomo’s 2017 state budget, which he’ll present next week, is likely to call for billions of dollars in new spending on highways and bridges. Unfortunately, taxpayers won’t get their money’s worth if the state continues to insist on rigging bids for public-works projects that all but guarantee the jobs will go to unions. Read More
Apparently looking to make a big splash with a pre-budget rollout of downstate infrastructure initiatives, Governor Andrew Cuomo aimed for the biggest body of water he could find: the Long Island Sound. The "2016 agenda" Cuomo unveiled before the Long Island Association today included revived plans for a third track on the main line of the Long Island Railroad, improvements to regional airports and other development projects. But the governor couldn't resist capping off the agenda with a real attention-getter: a $5 million feasibility study of "a tunnel connecting Long Island to either the Bronx, Westchester County or Connecticut." Read More
New York's leading export remains people. Read More
The rapid rise and costly fall of Health Republic Insurance of New York, the largest nonprofit health insurance “co-op” established under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, is a cautionary tale. Read More
State regulators should have foreseen the failure of NY's Obamacare co-op. Read More
Budget deficits papered over with borrowed money and fiscal gimmicks. Unaffordable union contracts. Pension contributions “amortized” into the future. Retiree health benefits promised but unfunded. Corruption probes and whiffs of scandal. Accountability blurred, responsibility shirked, and hard decisions avoided again and again. That litany could describe any number of old, declining American cities—including a few that, like Detroit, actually went broke. But the same dysfunction exists in affluent corners of New York’s archetypal suburb: Long Island Read More
"I want the Legislature to understand that we're serious about reform." So said Governor Andrew Cuomo following his veto of two bills that would have strengthened New York's Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)—helping citizens hold government, at all levels, more accountable. So if you can follow the governor's logic, before he could show us he was "serious about reform," he had to block a pair of reforms he had sitting on his desk. Read More
Governor Cuomo last week announced the completion of a construction project in Orange County, four years after the state Department of Transportation (DOT) deliberately added at least $4 million to the cost by improperly steering jobs to Hudson Valley unions—and cost taxpayers up to $22 million for the way it did it. Read More
Following his conviction on federal corruption charges, former Senator Dean Skelos apparently will qualify for a public pension of up to $95,590 a year. Read More