Call-to-Action: Albany wants your $$$ to pay for its overspending
A proposal to defer 50 percent of business tax incentives for three years remains under active discussion by the Governor and legislative leaders this week. Simply stated, this would amount to little more than the government borrowing from NY businesses (you!) to pay for excessive spending that lawmakers are unwilling to trim.
If you currently benefit [...]
Jay Gallagher: Unshackle Upstate loses a friend
When Unshackle Upstate launched in March 2006, Gannett News Service Bureau Chief, Jay Gallagher, covered our first trip to Albany.
He knew what we were up against.
Jay reported on Albany politics and government for a quarter century, and wrote a weekly column on state government since the late 1980s. He passed away Monday night, after a nearly year-long [...]
Albany Needs to Make the Right Cuts
There is no question that Governor Paterson and members of the Legislature are confronting very difficult decisions in trying to put together a budget that doesn’t further burden New Yorkers. But the pain of these decisions is largely self-inflicted and that is the problem.
For years, and across party lines, leaders have done their best to [...]
Unions and the Great Pay Debate
When talking about wages and benefits, the leadership of New York’s public employees union just misses the point.
Upstate MUST be aggressive in 2010!
Each and every spring we seem to do a lot of communicating with our members about how bad Albany is. Just a few years back, it was the Brennan Center’s report that New York State had the most dysfunctional government in the nation. Year-in and year-out around that time, late budgets became the norm, annually [...]
Another Missed Opportunity?
At its core, Unshackle Upstate is about finding solutions. Identify what the short-term needs are and back them up with sustainable, long-term reform. As the saying goes, “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” Through its policy agenda, Unshackle Upstate has supported wage freezes and payroll lags as [...]
Why I Can’t Support More State Borrowing to Balance the Budget
I was asked to support Lt. Gov. Ravitch’s plan to fix the state’s fiscal problems, but given the state’s history of budget shell games and uncontrolled spending, I’m just not comfortable with provisions in it that call for up to $2 billion more borrowing each year for the next three years.
Remember in November
I’m writing this in Buffalo, some 280 miles west of Albany. Put another way, I’m writing from the real world, which is REALLY far from New York’s capital city.
Can it possibly be true that an announcement was made over the weekend that state employees would be getting $1/2 billion in raises – when we have [...]
Mandate reform must go the distance
Recently, a proposal aimed at relieving the pressure of “property tax fatigue” on local school districts and taxpayers was passed by members of the Senate. While recognition of the need for such a plan seems long overdue, any proposal that can offer real and sustainable property tax relief is a step in the right direction.
The proposal offers [...]
Sensing change, but not enough
The mood in the state Capitol seems refreshingly a bit different, yet disturbingly all too the same.
Elected officials do recognize the seriousness of the state’s financial situation, but don’t seem ready or willing to take action that will result in lasting change.