The state is looking at the biggest budget gap since Gov. Cuomo first took office.

The state released its mid-year budget update several weeks late. The state has a $6 billion budget gap that is estimated to climb to $8.5 billion by 2023. Both E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center and Dave Friedfel of the Citizens Budget Commission agree that Medicaid is to blame.

“It is bad. And the main reason why it is bad is because the spending is exceeding revenues,” said David Friedfel, director of State Studies for Citizens Budget Commission of NYS.

The state budget office said Friday that its spending on Medicaid will exceed a statutory cap by $4 billion this fiscal year unless the state implements a significant savings plan.

That $4 billion includes a $1.7 billion payment that the state deferred last year into this fiscal year, which began in April. Part of the state's savings plan includes a permanent adjustment to defer certain health care payments into the future fiscal year. The deferral into fiscal 2021 is projected to be $2.2 billion.

Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, said the state's plan "simply perpetuates papering over the structural problem. For the remainder, the State again delays presenting a savings plan. Delays only serve to make the solution more painful."

Rein noted that the state doesn't need to look to Medicaid alone to address the imbalance. It could also lower funding toward "mistargeted school aid and unproductive economic development programs," he said.

Trains on the 4, 5, and 6 lines skipped the 125th Street station in Harlem during rush hour Friday evening. There was no track work underway, no broken signal, none of the usual dysfunction on the aged transit system. Instead, hundreds of demonstrators were signaling their discontent over plans from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to hire an additional 500 subway cops. Those plans have coincided with recent incidents of heavy-handed policing captured on passenger cellphones. These include the arrest of a woman for selling churros, the punching of a 16-year-old bystander during a fight on a Brooklyn train platform and the drawing of a gun on a suspected turnstile hopper.

The new cops are expected to crack down further on fare evasion, essentially a crime of poverty. They will allegedly save the Metropolitan Transportation Authority $200 million over the next four years. The cops come, however, with a $249 million price tag through that same time period, a cost that, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, will balloon to $1.4 billion over ten years. The new hires arrive as the MTA is operating at a growing budget deficit in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Hundreds of school bus drivers, matrons and other members of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181 rallied outside of Governor Cuomo’s midtown offices to urge him to sign a bill that would restore a provision that protected wages and fringe benefits such as pensions and vacation time that was eliminated in 2012.

The bill, sponsored by State Sen. Robert Jackson, would restore the Employee Protection Provision that was eliminated in December 2012 during the Bloomberg administration. The provision guaranteed school bus workers’ seniority rights and compensation levels when a route was taken over by a new company.

Although the bill has been approved in both houses of the State Legislature, Transport Workers Union Local 100 opposed it because it believed the seniority protections “would create a two-tier system for school bus workers” by putting younger workers’ jobs at risk, the union wrote in a letter this past June.

A day after the rally, the business-funded Citizens Budget Commission issued a letter to the Governor arguing against the provision’s restoration, claiming that it would harm city taxpayers because it “restricts hiring and retention to the most highly compensated employees and locks in high expenses.”

Gov. Cuomo faces a growing budget mess as officials projected a shocking $6.1 billion hole in the state’s finances next year.

The figure was provided by the state Division of Budget in its mid-year budget report, which was released weeks after its legally mandated due date.

More than half of the gap — $4 billion — is linked to a dramatic rise in the state’s Medicaid costs.

One health care expert said the growing Medicaid costs are the result of New York’s costly and unwieldy health care system.

“They failed to present a real plan,” criticized Dave Friedfel of the Citizens Budget Commission, a fiscal watchdog group.

New York City’s fiscal 2020 budget is now $94.4 billion after Mayor Bill de Blasio released his November plan update on Friday.

The figure is up $1.6 billion, or 1.7% from the spending plan de Blasio signed in June.

According to the mayor, the plan achieves $474 million in savings across fiscal 2020 and 2021. New city spending in FY20, he said, includes funding of costs related to a state-mandated criminal justice overhaul and fulfilling human services, and early childhood indigent defense provider commitments.

Since de Blasio took office in January 2014, the budget has risen more than 20%.

According to the nonprofit watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, city should spend less and save more. “The city’s already high level of expenditure [is] on an unsustainable trajectory,” CBC said.

CBC called on the city to restrain spending by offsetting new expenses with recurring commensurate savings; keep headcount flat and not exceed the FY19 year-end level of 326,739; substantially increase annual agency savings targets and ensure savings recur; and increase budgetary reserves or make deposits to the Retiree Health Benefit Trust, using additional resources generated by savings or higher than forecast revenues.

A group of 20 groups representing rider, watchdog and industry groups sent a November 15 letter to the MTA Board urging it to promptly appoint the Traffic Mobility Review Board (TMRB) and ensure that body follows the state Open Meetings Law (OML), according to the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC).

The law establishing the TMRB requires that it make its recommendations on congestion pricing (by law Central Business District or “CBD” tolling) no earlier than one year from today, with the MTA Board ultimately setting the tolling charges,” noted CBC, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization pursuing constructive change in the finances and services of New York City and State, in a release. The TMRB is also charged with “reviewing” the MTA 2020-2024 Capital Program.

Groups signing the letter include Reinvent Albany, Regional Plan Association, Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA (PCAC), Citizens Budget Commission, Riders Alliance, TransitCenter, and others. (See the letter for the full listing.)

The MTA is prepping to renovate a half-dozen subway stations along the 7 line in Queens, according to a news report.

The stations slated for a makeover are 52nd Street, 61st Street-Woodside, 69th Street, 82nd Street-Jackson Heights, 103rd Street-Corona Plaza and 111th Street, the Sunnyside Post reported.

Other stations along the 7 line could be added to the list, an agency spokesperson told the news outlet.



Construction could start as soon as summer 2020, when the transit authority expects to award a contract for the design work, according to the Sunnyside Post.

The six stations are some of the worst in the entire subway system, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, which named the 52nd Street station as the city's worst in a 2015 report.

Kudos to the Citizens Budget Commission for flagging yet another horrible bill that demands a veto from Gov. Andrew Cuomo: an outrageous effort to give school bus drivers special privileges at city taxpayers’ expense.

For decades, the city included these “employee-protection provisions” in its contracts with private bus companies. The EPPs forced companies to hire off “seniority” lists that mandated expensive pay and benefits.

But the requirements were always incompatible with state law. The 2011 ruling from the state’s top court noted that the city Department of Education couldn’t remotely show that the scheme was “designed to save the public money, encourage robust competition or prevent favoritism.”

In less than one year, the state-mandated Traffic Mobility Review Board can issue its nuts-and-bolts recommendations for how congestion pricing is supposed to work, what it will cost, and who will get much-desired exemptions from the toll.

Of course, there’s a few things that need to happen first — primarily Mayor de Blasio and the MTA Board have to actually appoint members to this obscure board, get it an office so it can start the work of setting those tolls and exemptions, and start holding meetings (which are supposed to be public, but might not be!).

On Friday, a coalition of 20 good government and transit advocacy groups including Reinvent Albany, the Permanent Citizens Advisory Council, the Citizens Budget Commission and the Straphangers Campaign fired the first warning shot, with a letter reminding the politicians who passed the tolling scheme earlier this year that the hard work of actually designing and then implementing congestion pricing still needs to be done before it supposed to (magically!) begin in January, 2021.

Private-sector involvement could help satisfy a repair backlog and trigger an overhaul at the New York City Housing Authority.

The authority, long a strain on city operating and capital budgets and with a track record of fiascoes and mismanagement, has a backlog of $32 billion over five years and $45 billion over 20, according to its most recent needs assessment.

According to the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission, NYCHA is on pace to meet its short-term target for increasing public-private partnerships. Still, said CBC, it cannot meet its long-term goal of converting 62,000 units without shifts in the allocation of state and local housing funding, federal regulatory relief and additional federal funding.

The MTA plans to overhaul the dilapidated 52nd Street station along with at least five other stations along the 7 line, the agency told the Queens Post on Friday.

The MTA says that it is in the design phase to rehabilitate the 52nd Street, 61st Street, 69th, 82nd , 103st and 111th Street stations– with a contract to be awarded for the work by the summer of 2020. An MTA spokesperson said the construction work could possibly begin soon thereafter.

The MTA has been planning to upgrade the stations for years, even allocating $122 million to repair these six stations in its 2015-2019 capital plan.

The stations are among the worst in the 467-station system. The Citizens Budget Commission back in 2015 noted that the 52nd Street station was the worst station in the system—with 79 percent of its structural components—defined as stairs, platform edges, ventilators and more– not in a state of good repair.