Homeowners earning between $250,000 and $500,000 a year will get a check for their STAR rebates this year rather than receiving the savings directly in their school-tax bills.

And that's not all: If any STAR recipient doesn't switch to a check, they won’t get a 2 percent increase in their tax savings this fall.

Critics ripped the changes and the ongoing tinkering with the popular program started in the mid-1990s, saying it is a sleight of hand to alter how the program is counted on the state's ledger.

"But by changing how the program functions, from a discount on a homeowner's property taxes to a state issued ‘personal income tax credit’ that is issued as a check, the state is able to artificially make state spending appear lower than it is," said David Friedfel, director of state studies for the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed group.

The New York state budget officially passed this weekend, and while it did include an increased “mansion" tax—a one-time sales tax on homes sold for more than $25 million—the much-buzzed about “pied-a-terre tax” was nowhere to be seen.

Talks of the tax, which would only apply to non-primary residences valued at over $5 million, resurfaced when billionaire Ken Griffin bought a $238 million Manhattan penthouse earlier this year.

The Citizens Budget Commission—a nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog group—also came out against the proposed levy, calling it “appealing but problematic.”

Ultimately, it seems New York representatives compromised. Instead of implementing the sliding-scale tax on ultra-luxe second homes, the group upped the state’s existing “mansion tax.” The tax will now start at 1% on homes sold for $1 million or more and max out at 4.15% on home purchases worth $25 million and up.

The MTA scored $25 billion in badly needed funding in Albany, but the legislative package lacks key reforms to dent the agency’s sky-high costs, good government groups said Monday.

“There are no rules, there’s just a promise of increased internal scrutiny,” said John Kaehny, executive director of good government group Reinvent Albany.

“It’s not a sufficient answer to the MTA’s problems — not even close. The politicians and unions have a marriage of great convenience. Everybody benefits from bloated costs, but the rider and the taxpayer.”

The MTA spends five times as much as London or Paris to build a mile of subway, figures show.

Budget watchdogs say massive labor inefficiencies help fuel the MTA’s eye-watering construction costs.

“Officials are going to have sit down with the unions and negotiate real changes to how we build transit projects in New York City,” said Maria Doulis of the Citizens Budget Commission.

“Riders are being asked to contribute more, drivers are being asked contribute more. The only group not being asked to come to the table is labor.”

Tucked into the $175.5 billion state budget the New York Legislature passed in the wee hours Monday are measures to stabilize the financially precarious Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The deal struck by Governor Cuomo, Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie aims to infuse as much as $25 billion into subways, buses, and commuter rails by imposing fees on vehicles entering Manhattan’s busiest streets, increasing taxes on luxury real estate, and collecting sales taxes from transactions in online retail marketplaces like eBay.

The tax could prove a boon above ground, too: Having an internet sales tax “is a good thing because it helps out brick and mortar stores, because they’re no longer at a disadvantage,” said David Friedfel of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal group.

New York State has an on-time budget, but some experts warn that it leaves the state vulnerable to an economic downturn.

The independent Citizen Budget Commission noted that the 2020 fiscal year budget agreement will likely result in a more than 3% increase in operational spending at a time when the state is facing an expected tax revenue shortfall.

The budget deal Gov. Andrew Cuomo cut with state lawmakers was announced Sunday, ending the threat of a late budget. The state fiscal year began Monday.

While Cuomo has pledged to add additional revenue identified by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli into the state’s rainy day fund, CBC Executive Director Andrew Rein stressed that the fund would still be less than $3 billion, too small to combat potential gaps experienced in past recessions. A recent CBC analysis said that during the recession of 2008, capital gains income decreased $84 billion from 2007 to 2009, which would equate to a $7 billion drop in personal income tax liability today.

The state Legislature put to bed the state budget early on Monday morning, and there are a lot of opinions about the $175 billion spending plan.

[…]

Citizens Budget Commission (CBC) President Andrew Rein:

“The Adopted Budget makes progress on a number of important policy areas, significantly in enacting congestion pricing to fund the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Unfortunately, the State’s leaders did not take sufficient action to protect New Yorkers from the fiscal and service impacts of a possible economic downturn.

While addressing Citizens Budget Commission trustees at the Yale Club in Midtown on Monday, Dr. Mitchell Katz, New York City Health + Hospitals president and CEO, said the city subsidy should be used to provide quality health care, not to subsidize insurance companies.

Proper billing has been a critical component of the health system's transformation plan to tackle its deficit, which climbed as high as $1.8 billion last year. "The next part of our work," Katz said, "is making sure that we're getting fair rates."

For instance, being paid $40 by an insurer for a patient's first visit with a primary care doctor doesn't allow for breaking even, he said. There are expenses for the doctor, the nurse, registration and billing. Much of the health system's deficit has been tied to subsidizing insurance plans rather than providing care to low-income uninsured people.

"We haven't erased the deficit, but we now have a plan that will erase the deficit," Katz said. H+H CFO John Ulberg said at the event that the health system has resolved $650 million of the deficit to date.

Aside from proper billing and securing fair rates, the plan largely focuses on driving up revenue rather than relying on the city subsidy and slashing expenses through space and administrative reductions.

But, Katz said, the health system's provision of 60% of the city's mental health services as well as care for the uninsured and those in correctional facilities are mission-aligned efforts that always will require a subsidy.

New York State has an on-time budget, but some experts warn that it leaves the state vulnerable to an economic downturn.
The independent Citizen Budget Commission noted that the 2020 fiscal year budget agreement will likely result in a more than 3% increase in operational spending at a time when the state is facing an expected tax revenue shortfall.

The budget deal Gov. Andrew Cuomo cut with state lawmakers was announced Sunday, ending the threat of a late budget. The state fiscal year began Monday.

While Cuomo has pledged to add additional revenue identified by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli into the state’s rainy day fund, CBC Executive Director Andrew Rein stressed that the fund would still be less than $3 billion, too small to combat potential gaps experienced in past recessions. A recent CBC analysis said that during the recession of 2008, capital gains income decreased $84 billion from 2007 to 2009, which would equate to a $7 billion drop in personal income tax liability today.

Mayor de Blasio claims his $582 million ferry system is helping to make New York “the fairest big city in America” — but mostly, it’s giving a huge taxpayer-subsidized benefit to the Big Apple’s richest areas, a Post analysis has found.

Nearly half of NYC Ferry’s ridership comes from one line that serves posh East River waterfront neighborhoods, according to a route-by-route review.

While NYC Ferry helps connect some transit-starved areas, nine of its 19 stops sit within half a mile of a subway station.

All this service to New York’s hottest waterfront areas — including Dumbo, Brooklyn Bridge Park and Long Island City — requires 10 times the publicly funded subsidy per ride, $10.73, as the MTA’s city bus and subway systems, a new report from the Citizens Budget Commission found.

That cost City Hall $44 million in 2018, budget documents show.

As usual, the City Council’s March agenda was mostly dominated by preliminary budget hearings, evaluating the mayor’s initial spending plan for the next fiscal year, which begins July 1. This stage of the city budget process started and finished with a general hearing held by the Council’s Finance Committee, along with its Capital Budget Subcommittee, with a series of more specific agency- and service-related hearings in between.

The preliminary budget hearings finished where they began, with Council Speaker Corey Johnson, a Manhattan Democrat, and other Council members looking for more details about cuts and efficiencies the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio plans to make across city agencies. When he presented a $92.2 billion preliminary budget in early February, de Blasio said he was instituting a $750 million PEG (program to eliminate the (budget) gap), the first PEG of de Blasio’s tenure, during which a very healthy economy has allowed the mayor and Council to increase spending very quickly, while also keeping reserves fairly high.

Johnson brought up a Citizens Budget Commission report, which said that a recession could cause revenue shortfalls of $15-20 billion over three years. This would use up the entirety of the city’s reserves. When asked if the administration thought that more should be added to the reserves, Hartzog reiterated that the reserves were sufficient to weather an economic slow down and said that the city was planning to add to the reserves moving forward.

New York lawmakers are racing to forge an agreement on the state’s budget before the fiscal year begins on April 1. At stake in the negotiations over Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposed $175 billion spending plan are issues that could be felt widely around the Empire State, including a permanent cap on property-tax bills, a ban on single-use plastic bags and a congestion fee on motorists driving into Manhattan’s traffic-clogged streets.

Plastic Bag

New York may become the second U.S. state to ban disposable plastic grocery bags, following California. If enacted, residents will have to bring their own bags to the grocery store or pay a fee for paper bags after March 2020. It would go a considerable way toward reducing waste: New York City alone tosses out 71,000 tons of plastic bags annually, according to the Citizens Budget Commission. Cuomo has said the budget is an effective vehicle to enact policies that might otherwise be difficult to pass the legislature in isolation, and the plastic bag provision is an example.

About 2,000 school bus workers in New York City are threatening to strike if certain employee protections for seniority and pay are not included in the state's budget, according to their union.

They want the state to fund Employee Protection Provisions in every school bus contract, which guarantee that workers retain their seniority rights, salary and benefits when the city Department of Education signs or revises contracts with private bus companies.

Michael Cordiello, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, said Saturday afternoon that if the provisions are not included in the budget, he expects to take a strike vote as early as next week.

Some studies have concluded the city would eventually save hundreds of millions of dollars restoring EPP, quelling turnover and labor disapproval, but other fiscal watchdogs, like the Citizens Budget Commission, say EPP hinders the competitive bidding process and costs taxpayers unnecessarily.