A group of Westbury High School students traveled to Albany Thursday to appeal to New York lawmakers for additional funding for their district as negotiations over the state budget approached an April 1 deadline.

State aid made up about a third of the district’s $145 million budget in fiscal year 2018, according to the district’s website.

Foundation Aid each school district receives is determined by the number of students, local property values and other factors, according to the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan think tank based in Manhattan.

In a sign that she continues to know how to make news, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon has gone after rival Andrew Cuomo for showering taxpayer dollars on the industry that helped make her a star.

According to the Citizens Budget Commission, when the state capped the program’s annual cost at $25 million in 2004, less than $1 million in tax credits were issued. Proponents argue that the incentive was not compelling enough. In 2010 the credits awarded reached $211 million, spurring a surge in production. It grew to about $427 million in 2014. Through 2019, when the program will expire if not renewed, it will have cost the state $4.5 billion since inception, the watchdog group calculated.

A May 2017 audit by the New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli found that the state’s Empire State Development failed to meet more than half of the reporting requirements for tax credit and job creation programs, including independent evaluations of the efficacy of economic development programs, general overviews, and program-specific reports.

The press conference follows the conviction of Cuomo’s top aide Joe Percoco on three corruption counts. Percoco was accused of taking more than $300,000 in bribes in exchange for government favors related to the state’s economic development programs.

“New York State allocates $4 billion per year to economic development. The people of the State deserve to know who is getting those benefits, how many jobs they are going to create, and if the projects are ultimately successful,” said David Friedfel, Director of State Studies for the Citizens Budget Commission.

Friedfel was joined by representatives from Reinvent Albany, Citizens Budget Commission, League of Women Voters, Common Cause and Fiscal Policy Institute.

The governor’s executive budget increases school aid across the state by $769 million over the current fiscal year, including $338 million in “Foundation Aid,” a supplemental funding formula to aid local school districts based on need. The increase brings the school aid total to $26.356 billion, an increase of 3% over last year. The executive budget claims that this is “double the statutory School Aid growth cap” and that school aid is the “state’s highest funding priority.”

Despite this, advocates have charged for years that the state’s funding formula leaves schools not fully funded, including as it relates to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity court ruling of more than a decade ago. Cynthia Nixon, who recently announced a challenge to Cuomo in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, has worked extensively with advocacy organization Alliance for Quality Education (AQE) and has made “fully funding” public schools a top campaign plank, adding an additional political element to budget negotiations around this topic.

The fault supposedly lies in the flawed Foundation Aid formula; the formula is based on a wealth index that, according to an analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission, “make the neediest districts in the state seem less needy, while the state’s wealthiest districts seem less wealthy.” The 2006 court ruling required the state to provide a more equitable funding formula, which led to Foundation Aid, but local politicians and advocates say that the state has not lived up to its agreement and that high need schools do not receive the aid they require.

— A bitter battle is brewing at the state Capitol over how more than $26.4 billion in school aid will be distributed in the coming year.

And the outcome, as well as reforms pushed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, will impact the nearly 700 school districts in New York.

Cuomo wants each district to report to the state how it specifically allocates its state aid: down to how much each and every school gets.

Meanwhile, advocates continue to deride a school-funding formula that they argue shortchanges needy districts.

“The school-aid formula primarily reflects data that updates automatically, including enrollment data, indices of district wealth and student need," he said.
"Our priority is to progressively drive aid to the schools that need it most."
But critics said the funding formula still has flaws.
For example, it doesn't account for a district's change in enrollment, which, if corrected, would send more money to poorer districts because they have had the largest enrollment increases, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.
The funding formula changes in recent years "were on the margins," said David Friedfel, the business-backed group's director of state studies.

“The school-aid formula primarily reflects data that updates automatically, including enrollment data, indices of district wealth and student need," he said.

"Our priority is to progressively drive aid to the schools that need it most."

But critics said the funding formula still has flaws.

For example, it doesn't account for a district's change in enrollment, which, if corrected, would send more money to poorer districts because they have had the largest enrollment increases, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

The funding formula changes in recent years "were on the margins," said David Friedfel, the business-backed group's director of state studies.

Budget analysts and industry advocates are puzzled by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposals to raise revenue for the state by drawing $1 billion from the corporate veins of the state’s health care industry. They call the raft of taxes and fees unreliable resources and poor policy. Lawmakers, likewise, have scrubbed elements of those proposals from their budget plans.

David Friedfel, director of state studies at the Citizens Budget Commission, said that given all the unknowns, “The state should really be doing a better job of building up its reserves and being conservative in its spending.” Taking the broad view, he noted that New York is in the midst of one of the largest economic expansions since 1850, but it won’t last forever.

SALT — The new $10,000 federal cap on state and local tax deductibility has Cuomo and others worried that many downstate residents in high-tax areas will be driven from the state. As a result, he wants employers to be able to make higher payroll tax payments, which would eliminate state income taxes for employees to offset the SALT changes. Businesses are somewhat cool to the idea, noting that such a change is a huge bureaucratic lift. One group, the Citizens Budget Commission, has offered its own variation on the plan.

The City Council hiked its own budget by a hefty 27% with a vote Thursday.

Under new Speaker Corey Johnson, the Council is boosting its spending by $17.3 million, from $64.1 million in the current fiscal year to $81.4 million next year.

The boost is enough to hire 125 more staffers, a 37% increase.

Two years after voting to award themselves salary hikes of 32 percent, City Council members on Thursday were poised to boost the body’s operational budget by more than $17 million in a single year.

That’s a 27 percent increase over the current fiscal year’s adopted budget of $65.1 million, and includes $13.1 million to hire 125 new staffers — bringing the total to 463.

“That’s a significant increase. While understandable that the Council may want to beef up its analytic and investigative capacity, such a large increase should be explained and justified to taxpayers,” said Citizens Budget Commission Vice President Maria Doulis.

“Certainly an agency proposing such an increase for its own budget would be carefully scrutinized by the Council.”

The City Council’s Committee on Finance voted on Thursday to increase the Council’s operating budget to $81.3 million, an increase of nearly 27 percent from the current fiscal year’s budget of $64 million, following through on Speaker Corey Johnson’s promise to increase internal resources and produce a stronger role for the legislative body in areas such as land use and oversight.

“It’s clear the Speaker wants the City Council to take on a more aggressive role and that may require beefing up analytic capacity and staffing,” said Maria Doulis, vice president of Citizens Budget Commission, an independent fiscal watchdog. “But just like with other city agencies, that increase should be justified...the Council has to articulate clearly the goals and what it hopes to accomplish, and demonstrate that it’s still keeping its operations lean and demonstrate to the taxpayer that it’s delivering results for the investment.”

Nearly $300 billion is at stake for New York City over the next three and a half decades, should the Cuomo administration and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority succeed in pushing their latest subway-funding proposal through Albany, city officials said Thursday.

"The MTA's proposal threatens New York City's fiscal health and represents a radical transformation of City funding obligations to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority," reads a briefing prepared by the city in response to draft legislation that would require City Hall to redirect property tax revenue to the MTA.

There's no disputing that mass transit improvements generate lots of additional tax revenue.

"It's a question of process, not value," said Carol Kellermann, president of the Citizens Budget Commission. "Who decides how to spend city property tax revenue? Should it be tied up so far into the future? How should these decisions be made and who should participate?"

Corey Johnson, the newly installed and fiercely vocal speaker of the New York City Council, wants to put his money where his mouth is.

Or rather, taxpayer money.

The speaker pushed a $17 million increase to the Council’s own budget — a 27 percent increase and the largest in at least a decade — to help pay for more staff and support Mr. Johnson’s goal of establishing the city’s legislative body as a viable counterweight to Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Budget analysts questioned the necessity, size and timing of the increases, which come amid concern over cuts from Washington and a possible economic downturn on the horizon. Mr. de Blasio, for his part, has highlighted the reserves his budget has amassed and the spending reductions at city agencies he has requested — even as his administration grew the budget substantially to $87 billion over his first term.

“It makes sense to beef up the Council’s analytic capacity, but 130 new people is quite an increase,” said Carol Kellermann, president of the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission, a city budget watchdog, adding that the Council should have to show the necessity of that steep an increase in staffing. “If a city agency came in and asked for a 27 percent increase, the Council would rightfully be quite skeptical.”