City Councilman Paul Vallone (D-Bayside) introduced a bill last week that would create a director of ferry operations position at the city Department of Transportation.

The lawmaker chairs the Committee on Economic Development, which oversees the city Economic Development Corp. The public-private entity controls the ferries for each borough except Staten Island. The EDC oversees Hornblower, the company that runs the day-to-day operations of the NYC Ferry program.

The development corporation launched NYC Ferry in May 2017. One ride on the boats costs $2.75, just like a single-ride subway ticket.

But according to a March report by the Citizens Budget Commission, the public subsidizes each ferry trip by $10.73 per passenger. For context, the CBC said the same number is $1.05 for each ride on the subways.

According to the nonpartisan watchdog, the subway system transports more people in a single day than NYC Ferry does in a year.

The EDC is expanding ferry operations. And a planned Coney Island route is expected to be subsidized by as much as $24.75 per ride, according to the CBC.

Ana Champeny, director of city studies for the Citizens Budget Commission, said reserve levels were insufficient.

“This paucity of reserves would not have been the case if the city had been permitted to set aside resources in a well-designed rainy day fund during the last 10 prosperous years,” Champeny said. “In fact, following CBC’s recommended strategy would have netted the city nearly $9 billion in reserves.”

Of all the strange moments in the wake of the collapse of Andrew Cuomo's Amazon HQ2 deal, the strangest may have been when the governor used the uproar over giving $3 billion in tax breaks to Jeff Bezos's tech giant to argue for the elimination of a subsidy that he himself has championed.

“The Senate’s position was very clear on Amazon, ‘We are against tax incentives to bring business to New York,’" Cuomo told reporters last month during the run-up to budget talks. To be "wholly consistent," he continued, state legislators should say "‘that’s why we’re against the film tax credit’ because it’s the exact same point.”

All this money is supposed to guarantee jobs, and indeed the film and TV industry does employ a lot of New Yorkers: 47,028 people in 2017, according to figures from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. Of these, a 2017 report for the state by economic consultants Camoin Associates claimed that more than 34,000 had been created as a direct result of the film tax credits.

The BLS data, however, tells a different story. In pre-tax-credit 2004, New York boasted 28,546 film and TV jobs, making the total increase by 2017 just 18,482 jobs — a little more than half what Camoin claimed. One likely reason for the discrepancy: Unlike BLS, Camoin's study counted every project worked as a separate job, no matter how long it lasted; "if you hire an electrician who works on set for three days, that counts as a job," notes David Friedfel, director of state studies for the Citizens Budget Commission.

New York City is experiencing a record-setting economic boon, with employment hitting new highs and unemployment falling to 40-year lows, according to a report released Wednesday by State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

In 2018, employment in the city reached 4.55 million, the highest jobs level ever recorded, the report said.

“New York City is experiencing its largest and longest job expansion since the end of World War II and the city has been the driving force behind the state’s employment gains,” DiNapoli said.

“For the first time since taking office, Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced plans to implement a Program to Eliminate the Gap, which requires agencies to generate savings through expense reductions or revenue enhancements,” the watchdog Citizens Budget Commission said in a report released last month. “The process of identifying savings is never easy, but the City is right to prepare for an economic slowdown or contraction. Furthermore, the City benefits from a regular effort to examine operations, set priorities, and reduce costs. This discipline can yield benefits in good as well as leaner times.”

The Citizens Budget Commission has come out in support of legislation that would impose a 5-cent fee on most paper carryout bags.

In written testimony submitted to the City Council Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, the think tank stated that a ban on plastic bags along with a fee on alternatives, such as paper bags, is more effective than a simple ban."

Absent the fee, which provides the economic incentive to bring reusable bags to the store, simple bans tend to shift consumers from one type of bag to another rather than reducing the use of single-use bags," the testimony reads.

When the budget passed in Albany earlier this month, one bill came up a little short.

"Capital budget is a bill that is part of the budget. There are three appropriations bills and the capital budget is one of those," said David Freidfel of the Citizen's Budget Commission. "This year, they did pass a capital bill, but it was a little bit lighter than years past. It contained the real basic nuts and bolts that you'd like to see in a capital budget. It was missing some of those additional items that the governor and the legislators kind of dole out later."

With New York City's rent regulations set to expire in June, Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie last week backed a plan to make rent stabilization available upstate as well. That proposal, however, revived a familiar debate about whether rent restrictions improve conditions for tenants, or just make them worse.

Other criticisms of the city's rent regulation are more nuanced. The fiscally conservative Citizens Budget Commission determined that rent-regulated tenants in New York City are slightly less likely to be rent-burdened, but that many of the benefits go to high-income earners. It also notes that regulated apartments tend to be in poorer condition than non-regulated units.

The CBC argued in a January study that regulations should target apartments housing the most rent-burdened, and that rent stabilization should be eliminated for households earning at least $200,000 per year.

Over the past two weekends, a bit of mild, sunny weather attracted New Yorkers of all ages to their parks. Last weekend, my wife and I spent two hours in Morningside Park, chasing our 20-month-old granddaughter from one side to the other of a beautifully designed, age-appropriate playground. We weren’t alone; there must have been another 200 children and adults enjoying the beautiful weather and brand newly refurbished playground. Morningside Park wasn’t always so beautiful. When we first moved into our apartment on Morningside Drive in 1990, the sounds from the park were often gunshots, not the shouts of gleeful children.

After a long and difficult effort, New Yorkers re-took their public spaces in the last years of the 20th century and have continued that work throughout the 21st century. The parks are wonderful and full of life. According to a 2017 report of the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), people feel extraordinarily safe in parks during the daytime. Overall, about 85% of CBC’s survey respondents reported feelings of safety in the parks: 89.9% of white respondents and 78.9% of black and Hispanic respondents responded positively when asked about park safety. The City’s park budget has grown from $398 million in fiscal year 2015 to $468 million in fiscal year 2019. That is a tiny share of the city’s overall budget of $92 billion. The department employs 7,836 people as compared to 7,774 in 2015. New York City government’s direct employees total 389,454. But these numbers do not include the large number of people working in parks for nonprofits such as the Central Park Conservancy or the Friends of the High Line. It does not include all the volunteers in our boroughs cleaning the parks or planting flowers and vegetables either.

The tiny investment of city funding is augmented by the time, money and energy of New Yorkers, most of whom rely on the parks for outdoor access. While most of the land in New York City sits beneath single family homes, most of the people in New York live in multifamily dwellings with no private outside spaces. The parks in New York are everyone’s backyard. They are also one of the most diverse and democratizing places in the city. There are no VIP lounges in the parks, no rope lines, and no admission tickets that must be bought.

Governor Andrew Cuomo and his Democratic cohorts have approved $840 million in refundable credits for television and movie producers over the next two fiscal years. This comes on top of $7.3 billion worth of incentives handed to the industry since 2004, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

“That’s almost two new Tappan Zee Bridges that we’ve spent just on subsidizing the film industry,” said David Friedfel, director of state studies for the CBC, a business-backed watchdog, to Crain’s New York Business. The sum is “twice as much as Amazon would have gotten and they would have created 25,000 jobs.”

According to Crain’s, the two-year extension “underscores the persistence of government aid to industries that are generous political patrons or haven’t antagonized labor unions, as Amazon did. New York Democrats and Republicans have collected millions of dollars in campaign contributions from Hollywood moguls like Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, as well as from media companies and New York City film studios.”

Not satisfied with all the destruction that rent regulation has rained on the city’s housing market, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie now wants to expand it statewide.

This may just be a bluff, a threat that will make it easier to pass his real agenda — namely, tightening the city’s rent laws in order to please ideologues and activists.

Lawmakers will be “laser-focused on rent regulations,” vows Heastie, since the city’s regulations expire in June. And he, along with Gov. Cuomo, are intent on making the regs hit harder.


Rent regs, Citizens Budget Commission research shows, lead to “less well-maintained” housing, as building owners can’t bring in enough income from tenants to fund fixes. Nor do the regs benefit just low-income tenants: In 2017, high earners held nearly 100,000 rent-stabilized units in the city.

“Reforms” that Heastie, Cuomo & Co. mean to pass “would exacerbate many of rent regulation’s flaws and will not make a meaningful impact on the affordability of rental housing,” the CBC wrote. Rather, they’ll “further benefit upper-income renters without providing relief to the low-income households most likely to be rent burdened.”

Some ideas, like limiting landlords’ ability to pass costs of improvements on to tenants, as Cuomo wants, may even “aggravate” the physical condition of regulated buildings, the CBC warns.

Renting remains an increasingly popular choice in cities throughout the country, where on-the-go millennials with mobile jobs and lifestyles prefer to remain untethered to a specific location. But often, making rent doesn’t equate with staying on budget or having the amount of space you really need. A new study by RENTCafe looks into the issue of rent burden, asking how much space a typical income would get you if you limited your rent to no more than 30% of your income. Their findings show that in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Boston spending 30% of your income on rent means you’d have to live in less than 300 square feet of space.

An analysis of New York renters by the Citizens Budget Commission last year revealed that 44 percent of all New York households are rent burdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of income toward rent. More than half of those renters are severely rent burdened, paying more than 50 percent of their income on rent—and out of those, about 368,000 households are low income New Yorkers, a total that exceeds the Mayor’s entire 300,000 unit Housing New York plan.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo put the kibosh late Friday night on a legislative addition to the budget that could potentially give lawmakers $44 million in capital spending to dole out.

In a veto message, Cuomo said that leaving that additional funding in the enacted budget will hurt the state's ability "to maintain a properly balanced budget." The rest of the 123 line item vetoes that the governor made to the state's $175 billion spending plan was for technical reasons.

It's not clear how this process will play out or where the revenue for additional capital spending will come from.

If additional capital spending is approved, fiscal watchdogs hope that its parameters will be clearly defined and subject to accountability measures.
Citizens Budget Commission director of state studies David Friedfel warned that legislators have too much control over how this money is spent and said it has led to "legal troubles" in the past.

Friedfel said the final budget also removed Cuomo's proposal to give the state's inspector general more oversight of how this type of money is spent.