You can call Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of state Medicaid outlays “reckless” — if you want to be kind. Yet this seedy pattern of pay-to-play merits far harsher terms.

As The New York Times reports, the gov OK’d a $140 million-a-year bump in Medicaid reimbursements for hospitals soon after the Greater New York Hospital Association complied with his campaign’s “request” for a “donation” to the state Democratic Party.

“Demand for a bribe” is more like it.

The association had been begging for the increase in reimbursement rates for years. But it got it only after ponying up more than $1 million (twice what it had given any campaign in at least a decade) to a Cuomo-controlled housekeeping account.

The rise in payment rates fed a growing funding shortfall for the state’s Medicaid program. But the gov’s minions hid the budget hole by delaying payments and pushing the $1.7 billion problem into the new fiscal year.

That just lets the problem snowball: The Citizens Budget Commission now warns that New York faces a $7 billion Medicaid shortfall over the next four years, on top of a $12.8 billion budget gap.

“It’s everything that’s wrong with Albany in one ugly deal,” says Empire Center’s Bill Hammond. Cuomo funneled cash “to a major interest group while secretly accepting its campaign cash and papering over a massive deficit.”

The 2020-24 capital plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which its board approved last week, is so full of good things it reads almost like a Christmas list for mass-transit buffs. At $51.5 billion it is, by a long shot, the biggest capital plan in the agency's history. And it devotes nearly 80% of its spending to New York City's subways and buses—a leap in the right direction from the previous five-year plan, which directed roughly half of its $32.5 billion budget to the system that accounts for the overwhelming bulk of MTA ridership.

"To execute this plan and more than $11 billion in prior overdue projects in the next five years would require the MTA to virtually double its past rate of commitments," wrote Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein last week, "which is not realistic."

Rein told Crain's he wants to see a focus on initiatives that "are essential to reversing the system's decline"—namely, state-of-good-repair projects across the subway system, and signal modernization. "Timelines that identify priorities" would ensure the most necessary projects get done, he said.

Mayor de Blasio’s heavily-subsidized NYC Ferry service is primarily used by white, upper-middle class people, ridership data released Tuesday shows.

The city’s nonprofit Economic Development Corporation, which runs the ferry network with private cruise company Hornblower, conducted a survey of more than 5,400 riders over a two-week period in May and June. The agency’s analysts determined that 64% of the boat users are white, and that riders’ median annual income falls in the $75,000 to $99,000 range.

Representatives from the EDC pointed out that the ferry’s per-rider subsidy is declining — the city spent $9.34 per trip in the 12 months ending in June, down from $10.73 per trip the year prior. The subway, on the other hand, receives roughly $1.05 worth of subsidies per rider, according to a report released earlier this year by the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission.

Sean Campion, who authored the CBC report, said that the ferry’s per-trip subsidy may continue to fall into the $7 or $8 range, but questioned why the mayor insists on charging a flat $2.75 fare to ride the boats.

“The reasons why the ferry system is so expensive to operate and requires such a high level of subsidy is two-fold,” said Campion. “One is the operations themselves are really expensive and have a high fixed cost. The second piece is the revenue — the decision to go with a single-priced fare that’s the same as the swipe of a MetroCard keeps the subsidy up.”

Campion said the city would be smart to charge higher fares on weekends and during off-peak periods when fewer people are using the service to commute to work.

With the city Housing Authority in long-term crisis, Mayor de Blasio last year finally admitted the need for radical change. Unfortunately, other city politicians still in denial are blocking vital steps to get NYCHA back on its fiscal feet.

As Nolan Hicks reported this week, Speaker Corey Johnson and other electeds wrote NYCHA chief Gregory Russ, insisting that the proposed “relocation of 72 low-income families at Fulton Houses to build luxury towers is unacceptable.”

No matter that the tenants would still be fine, nor that the move would allow for market-rate and affordable housing while raising $2 billion for NYCHA repairs.

This follows the recent Citizens Budget Commission warning that the city is falling short on the $24 billion master plan to turn NYCHA around, as several proposals like the Fulton Houses one have stalled.

The Citizens Budget Commission has crunched the numbers on the MTA's decision to retain 500 police officers and the move will put the transportation agency much deeper into the red ink.

Transit officials decided to keep the cops on staff to assist in governor Cuomo's plan to cut down on fare beaters and assaults on riders.

Andrew Rein, President of the Citizens Budget Commission, told the New York Post, "Adding to the deficit should only be done with extreme care and considering the trade-offs. Ultimately somebody has to pay the bill — or we need to find ways to cut costs within the MTA."

With the cost of the new officers reaching over $100 million per year, MTA board member Bob Linn asked, "Where have we talked about how that's going to be budgeted? What I keep seeing is solutions announced first, and then see whether the data supports it."

With the addition of the new officers, the MTA's operating budget will be over $740 million in the hole in four years.

As the MTA board approved its "largest ever" five-year capital plan on Wednesday, pegged at $51 billion, the mood was not as celebratory as might be expected.

The MTA’s operating budget, on the other hand, remains a hot mess.

The MTA is forecasting deficits of $600 million in 2021, $800 million in 2022 and $1 billion in 2023. Officials hope to slash those deficits by restructuring the state authority, but analysts tend to regard those hopes as overly optimistic. In the meantime, after apparent pressure from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the MTA has to find room in its operating budget to pay for 500 new police officers.

That will cost $56 million the first year and ramp up to $120 million a year 10 years on, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission. The MTA contends the cops will partly pay for themselves by cracking down on fare evasion.

The MTA’s hasty decision to retain 500 new police officers will exacerbate its already dire financial situation, growing its deficit to $1 billion in the coming years, according to a new analysis released Wednesday.

Transit officials announced plans earlier this month to hire the officers as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s multi-pronged strategy to tackle fare evasion and assaults on transit workers and riders.

At the time, the MTA said funding for the new jobs would come from $40 million provided by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance.

But the cost of the hiring spree far exceeds Vance’s contribution — to the tune of $260 million over the next four years and nearly $1 billion over the next decade, according to numbers crunched by fiscal watchdog Citizens Budget Commission.

The calculation is based on the cost per additional officer — at least $93,000 per head — plus the cost to employ another 81 supervisors to manage them. The total bill will rise from $56.1 million in the first year to $119.9 million 10 years down the road.

Some advocates for New York City Housing Authority residents are “instilling fear” and “misunderstanding” among those who live in public housing, a NYCHA executive said Tuesday.

Deborah Goddard, NYCHA’s executive director for capital projects, spoke on a panel on aging infrastructure at City & State’s Rebuilding NY conference at Baruch College. Goddard was responding to a question from the panel’s moderator, lobbyist Suri Kasirer, on what she thought about the political challenges to NYCHA’s plan to fund improvements for living conditions for some of the authority’s 400,000+ residents. Among the plans are “infill,” or leasing underutilized NYCHA land to developers who would build new, mostly market-rate, housing. But according to a Citizens Budget Commission report out this week, those projects have stalled amid opposition from elected officials and residents, many of whom worry that the new buildings could jeopardize their own subsidized housing

While de Blasio was on the campaign trail, the ailing New York City Housing Authority got a new chair, Greg Russ. He arrived with the consent of federal authorities who previously prompted NYCHA to bring in an outside monitor to ensure the agency addresses widespread health and safety hazards.

NYCHA remains behind target on its own promises to inspect and remediate toxic lead paint in 135,000 apartments believed to pose potential risks. Meanwhile, the authority is struggling to tackle a growing backlog of tenant requests to clean up mold.

This week, the Citizens Budget Commission assessed NYCHA 2.0, de Blasio’s late-2018 plan to generate revenue through private investment, and found that without major gains in political support locally and in Washington, “its prospects remain tenuous.”

Talk always has been cheaper than action when it comes to modernizing the city’s mass transit system.

On Monday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority challenged the state and city to put $51.5 billion where their mouths are.

Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, was somewhat more reserved in his statement, saying the MTA must determine if it is spending money on the right things and just how sound the financing is.

“The plan assumes $3 billion in funding from New York State and $3 billion from New York City; neither the State nor the City has authorized these commitments,” Rein said in an email.

He also asked if the MTA would be able to implement a plan of its proposed size, which he and the agency both said is 70 percent greater than the agency’s 2015-19 capital plan.

he authority’s infill program is facing an uphill battle, says a new report.

A New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) program that seeks to monetize the agency’s underutilized land through partnerships with private developers has faced fierce push back that threatens to stall the initiative, according to a new Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) report.

The embattled housing authority has some 80 million square feet of unused development rights, but through infill projects NYCHA seeks to earn some $2 billion over 10 years and put that money back into repairing the city’s public housing as part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s $24 billion plan, dubbed NYCHA 2.0, to overhaul the system.

That plan was unveiled in December, but since then projects have “stalled” in part because of “resistance from elected officials and concerns from residents, and no new requests for proposals have been issued,” states the CBC report. This has played out at NYCHA’s Holmes Towers development in the Upper East Side where the city’s first 50/50 projects was set to rise.

Like so many decisions made by our political leaders, this one started with a story in the news.

In June, NY1 reporter Dan Rivoli got his hands on subway incident reports going back 10 years and found that the number of incidents involving homeless people had tripled during that time. The number of incidents logged by the rail control towers, which receives information from conductors and train operators on subway cars and in stations, had gone from 254 in 2008, to 836 in 2018. Most of those “incidents” caused some sort of delay to riders.

Weeks after the governor demanded the MTA fix the homeless issue it began a hiring spree. Ads started popping up in subway stations announcing the MTA is hiring 500 new police officers, which would double its current police force.

The governor and MTA defended the costs, saying the Manhattan District Attorney is covering it with $40 million from his office. But in the original announcement about this funding stream, it notes the money will also be used for new video technology and related construction costs.

With starting MTA police salaries of $42,000 plus benefits, the Citizens Budget Commission told Gothamist/WNYC that it estimated the cost of these officers could be $663 million over a 10-year period. In the first year, 500 officers could cost $41 million, growing to $96 million by the tenth year.