This year's battle for control of the state Senate is more than a question of partisan head count, according to New York's education advocates. The prospect of a Democratic takeover of the upper chamber has enormous implications for funding, priorities, teacher evaluations and even upstate-downstate relations.

In the Legislature, the majority party rules and minority party members settle for leftovers, if they get anything at all. That's already causing "trepidation" in suburban and rural districts, said New York State Council of School Superintendents communications director Bob Lowry, because so few Democratic senators represent upstate communities.

"Politicians' views are affected by their daily lives as well as by advocacy," Lowry said. "I think that city people don't grasp property tax issues and school issues the same as people from outside the city do because they don't live with those issues the way people elsewhere do."

And then there's the Foundation Aid formula, which is supposed to direct aid toward schools and districts that need it the most. But as it is currently applied, it takes money that would otherwise be directed to New York City and funnels it elsewhere in the state, said David Friedfel, director of state studies at the Citizens Budget Commission. That could change in a Democratic Senate, with its heavy component of New York City senators.

While the de Blasio administration has been making strides towards creating and preserving affordable housing—they want to create or preserve 300,000 affordable units by 2026—the number of severely rent-burdened New Yorkers has increased slightly or remained steady, an analysis by the non-profit watchdog group, Citizens Budget Commission has revealed.

CBC based its analysis on the recently released New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey. That shows that 44 percent of all New York households are rent burdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of income toward rent, after accounting for rental housing vouchers and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. A little over half of these households are severely rent burdened, which means they pay more than 50 percent of their income toward rent.

Stan Brezenoff needed no prodding when New York Mayor Bill de Blasio asked him to oversee the city’s troubled public housing agency.

“I don’t like retirement, but it just needed to be done, and I find it very hard to say no to mayors and governors, with a few exceptions,” Brezenoff, the interim chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, said after Wednesday’s speech at a Citizens Budget Commission breakfast forum.

Long recognized as a public-sector Mr. Fix-It, Brezenoff now has the embattled New York City Housing Authority under his watch.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and the New York City teachers union announced a tentative contract Thursday that includes pay bumps and incentives to teach in hard-to-staff jobs in schools with high turnover.

The contract with the United Federation of Teachers would give members compounded wage increases of 2% in February 2019, 2.5% in May 2020 and 3% in May 2021. It would expire in September 2022.

Critics of an expensive pool for teachers who lost positions due to school closures, or following disciplinary cases and other factors, were disappointed as well: Some hoped it would limit how long such teachers can linger on the payroll without permanent positions. The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent watchdog, reported the pool cost $136 million last school year.

Maria Doulis, vice president of the commission, said contract negotiations were “the time to have very candid conversations about how to eliminate it.”

The city is building and preserving more affordable housing than ever, but federal programs remain the most effective tool for supporting the poorest households, according to a report released Thursday.

The Citizens Budget Commission analyzed a recent housing survey and found that around 44% of households pay more than 30% of their income in rent—after accounting for government subsidies such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Section 8 housing vouchers.

The 30% rule, the federal standard for being rent-burdened, is an imperfect measurement. High earners could spend a third of their income on rent and still have money left over for luxuries; but some low-income residents, who make up the lion's share of the rent-burdened, can be hard-pressed to pay for necessities if 30% of their earnings go toward rent.

Back in 2004, New York debuted a $25 million tax credit for TV shows and movies produced on soundstages in the state. The program has since morphed into a $420 million incentive that's the largest in the nation and one the industry says it can't live without.

"The tax credit is the engine that moves the machine," John Battista, Executive Vice President of York Studios in the Bronx said Tuesday at Crain's Entertainment Summit.

Indeed, the tax credit is so popular that this year's allocation was used up by April 2017, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, which calculated the program cost the state $4.5 billion since inception. The commission, along with the Empire Center for Public Policy, has long opposed the credit on the grounds that the costs aren't commensurate with the rewards. Even actress Cynthia Nixon said she opposed the tax break during her campaign for governor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration and the New York City teachers union announced a tentative contract Thursday that includes pay bumps and incentives to teach in hard-to-staff jobs in schools with high turnover.

The contract with the United Federation of Teachers would give members compounded wage increases of 2% in February 2019, 2.5% in May 2020 and 3% in May 2021. It would expire in September 2022.

City officials said the total cost of the 43-month agreement is $2.1 billion, which would be offset by health-care savings and funding already in the city’s labor reserve, for a net budget impact of $572 million.

Critics of an expensive pool for teachers who lost positions due to school closures, or following disciplinary cases and other factors, were disappointed as well: Some hoped it would limit how long such teachers can linger on the payroll without permanent positions. The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent watchdog, reported the pool cost $136 million last school year.

Maria Doulis, vice president of the commission, said contract negotiations were “the time to have very candid conversations about how to eliminate it.”

The cash-starved New York City Housing Authority is operating under “triage” conditions and doesn’t have the resources to repair thousands of apartments, interim chairman Stanley Brezenoff said Wednesday.

“I wish it were not the case, I wish we had another $1 or $2 billion a year for operations,” Brezenoff told the Citizens Budget Commission during a breakfast at the Yale Club.

“We are prioritizing, triaging, making judgments about the most effective use of our dollars.”

New York City Housing Authority interim Chairman Stanley Brezenoff expressed doubts on Wednesday about the prospect of an independent monitor overseeing the agency, saying the arrangement could become overbearing and counterproductive.

The proposed decree, signed in June between City Hall, the embattled housing authority and federal prosecutors, would entail the appointment of an outside monitor to keep the agency in check with federal regulations. The agreement — which Mayor Bill de Blasio touted as a "pivotal moment" for NYCHA residents — followed a multiyear federal investigation that exposed cover-ups, widespread mismanagement and decrepit conditions at authority developments.

“I have some trouble with this proposed monitorship because it’s much more actively constructed, where there’s more of a management role, at least in vision,” Brezenoff said at a Citizens Budget Commission event on Wednesday. “And I think it is a prescription for difficulty, if not disaster.”

New Yorkers are so far turning up their noses at the city’s ambitious organics collection program, which has stalled because not enough people are participating in the often-smelly chore of separating out all those table scraps, spoiled meat, rotten vegetables and cut grass.

Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced his pilot program five years ago, hoping hundreds of thousands of tons of the city’s leftovers and yard waste would be churning their way through the system by now to be turned into compost, gas or electricity.

One budget watchdog group estimates that collecting organics costs over five times more than collecting normal garbage. Ana Champeny, the Director of City Studies at the Citizen’s Budget Commission, calculated the collection cost for organics at around $1,700 a ton, compared with $291 for regular refuse. That only adds to the overall cost of a program the commission estimates at $177 million to $251 million every year.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Marc Molinaro wants to cut property taxes by nearly 30 percent in New York through a variety of fiscal moves, including having the state pick up the remaining costs to counties to pay for Medicaid

The 30 percent cut would be phased in over five years and ban state grants to private corporations, make the property tax cap permanent and make it more difficult for to install higher state taxes.

He would also eliminate a higher income-tax rate on millionaires set to expire next year.

In a report Oct. 1, the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed group, said New York needs to change the way Medicaid is funded, saying counties should no longer be on hook for the cost.

The group suggested a number of ways the state could incur the costs, such as ending other tax-break programs for homeowners or using a portion of sales tax to pay for it.

"Fifty years after the initiation of the Medicaid local share, the arrangement remains a poor way to finance the program," the group said in a report.

"The state should design a way to eliminate the mandated local share in a reasonable time period."

Our city’s housing crisis takes many shapes and forms, none more drastic than the current state of the New York City Housing Authority.

The needed repair work for Nycha’s nearly 185,000 apartments adds up quickly—$32 billion over the next five years, the authority estimates, just for capital needs. Many units are so damaged they risk becoming obsolete without these repairs. The Citizens Budget Commission has warned that by 2027, over 90% of Nycha units will be too far gone, and it will be cheaper to build new apartments than to repair the existing ones.

If the city is to raise these funds, the mayor’s office and Nycha must commit to expanding the NextGen Neighborhoods program with a new NextGen 2.0 that includes full market-rate development on underutilized land, the transfer of unused development rights to neighboring property owners and selling unused parcels where appropriate.