A challenging fiscal environment and notoriously high property taxes have raised structural and service issues to new levels as communities explore the potential efficiencies to be gained through shared services, dissolution and consolidation. Read More
An article in The New York Times today touts NBC’s “significant investment” in a state-of-the-art studio at 30 Rockefeller Center for “Tonight” and its new host, Jimmy Fallon. But the article never mentions who’s footing a chunk of the bill for Tonight’s move back to New York from California: the taxpayers of New York State. Read More
Governor Andrew Cuomo is pushing the broadest and most concerted facility downsizing effort by any New York governor in recent history, as noted here last summer. In addition to prison closures and consolidations, the governor has proposed shutting down nine psychiatric centers for the acutely mentally ill, consolidating a new institutional network of “Regional Centers of Excellence,” and shifting more of the Office of Mental Health (OMH) budget to”community-based” services. Read More
The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) has officially confirmedpretty much what it predicted last fall: the taxpayer-financed pension contribution rate payable in the fall of 2015 will rise to 17.53 percent of teacher payrolls, or 1.28 percent above the contribution payable this coming September. Read More
The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) has officially confirmed pretty much what it predicted last fall: the taxpayer-financed pension contribution rate payable in the fall of 2015 will rise to 17.53 percent of teacher payrolls, or 1.28 percent above the contribution payable this coming September. Read More
Under the 2014 enacted budget, capital expenditures on highways and bridges were projected to total $19.742 billion by 2018. But under Cuomo’s latest budget proposal, the five-year total would come to $19,462, a decrease of $280 million from what was projected just a few months ago. Read More
High-income New Yorkers are probably the least stable, consistent and reliable segment of the city's income tax base. According to state tax data, there were 49,000 city households with adjusted gross income of more than $500,000 as of 2007. They earned $135 billion that year. Read More
The full extent of the continuing rise in school spending since the recession was not inevitable or unavoidable. It was the result of (a) increasing teacher compensation costs driven largely by automatic pay raises, and (b) continued relatively high levels of staffing, relative to enrollment, especially in non-teaching titles. Read More
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has agreed to a seven-year contract that will give MTA cops base pay increases totaling 18 percent, including a 7.5 percent retroactive boost effective immediately, the Daily News reports. Union members also scored a boost in their longevity pay, which will rise to a maximum of $9,800, in exchange for agreeing to curb overtime, stretch-out the schedule of annual pay hikes for newly hired officers and make new recruits pay 2 percent of their salaries toward health insurance. Read More
‘Building on Success” was the theme of Gov. Cuomo’s election-year budget presentation in Albany this week. But while Cuomo boasts he’s got New York headed in the right direction, the latest economic and demographic indicators suggest we still have a long way to go. Read More
New York’s imminent fall from third to fourth most populous state can be attributed mainly to its heavy loss of residents to the rest of the country—a trend persisting in this decade, according to the latest Census data. Read More
New York’s imminent fall from third to fourth most populous state can be attributed mainly to its heavy loss of residents to the rest of the country—a trend persisting in this decade, according to Census Bureau data released today. Read More