Kudos to City Councilman Paul Vallone for refusing to let Mayor de Blasio get away with his unprecedented gift of taxpayer dollars to reward a single school-bus company — a firm run by a big donor and repped by Democratic fixer Harold Ickes.

But the council didn’t know the payouts would go to just one firm. That explains why the mayor never again asked lawmakers to OK the specific payout, instead burying it in his overall budget.

As the Citizens Budget Commission notes, it’s a terrible precedent — eroding the Bloomberg savings and undermining the integrity of the city’s procurement process by letting one firm win extra cash after bidding to provide a service for less.

A broad coalition of environmental groups, good-government organizations and transit advocates are urging Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers to approve new funding for public transportation in New York City.

The group, known as the Move NY Coalition, includes groups like the Citizens Budget Commission, the League of Conservation Voters and the Straphangars Campaign.

The coalition on Friday called the city’s public transportation system a “mess” and said traffic in the city is “intolerable.”

Mr. Cuomo also called for decoupling the state from the Federal tax code. His plan was light on details, but the goal was “to avoid more than $1.5 billion in state tax increases brought solely by increases in Federal taxes,” his office said.

Mr. Mujica said decoupling would save New Yorkers that amount in additional Federal taxes.Business groups were cautious about the proposal.

“Employers will have to carefully consider the shift of tax liability and administrative costs when evaluating this election,” said Heather Briccetti, president of the state Business Council. “The creation of a charitable-contribution mechanism is more palatable to the state’s business community, but its value will depend on IRS deductibility.”

Carol Kellermann of the business-funded Citizens Budget Commission praised Mr. Cuomo’s proposals as “bold and important steps,” but said her group was still analyzing them in search of eventual problems.

Even before the Trump administration decided to end the CSRs, the Essential Plan, a $3.8 billion program, had a $280 million surplus, according to the DOH document. That's because the state is eligible for significantly more federal money than it needs to run the program.

So when the Trump administration cut $1.1 billion in CSR funding, the Essential Plan was really only short $300 million.
Here's how the Cuomo administration made up for that shortfall — and then some.

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Moving it out of the Medicaid program and into the Essential Plan takes it off the state's Medicaid books. That makes it much easier to comply with the Medicaid global cap, which prohibits Medicaid spending from growing faster than the 10-year rolling average of the medical portion of the consumer price index.

"It is indicative of the immense pressure on the cap and the budget in general this year," said Patrick Orecki, a research associate with the Citizens Budget Commission. "It's a creative way of solving that global cap savings target."

Starting this year, the state’s central economic development agency is required to produce an annual comprehensive report of all of the state-funded programs it oversees. The requirement of Empire State Development (ESD) was part of the state budget agreement reached last April amid intensifying criticism of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s approach to economic development.

With the report due on December 31 of each year, ESD must compile the past fiscal year's “aggregate totals” for each economic development program administered by the agency, examining “program progress, program participation rates, economic impact, regional distribution, industry trends, and any other information deemed necessary by the commissioner," according to the 2017-2018 enacted budget.

Among watchdogs who reviewed the ESD report, the primary criticisms are that it lacks recipient-level data, it at times only shows “net new job commitments” instead of actual jobs created, and has inconsistent definitions for what constitutes a job.

Recipient-level data, which shows return on investment from individual projects, is crucial for determining any program’s true cost-per-job, according to David Friedfel, director of state studies for Citizens Budget Commission (CBC).

“Taxpayers should know if individual projects are receiving benefits under multiple programs, the total amount of state and local spending, the number of jobs promised and created, and the amount of capital expense committed and expended by the company,” said Friedfel in an email, noting that such information could be made available with the creation of an online “database of deals,” a key recommendation repeatedly pushed by CBC and other fiscal watchdogs and government reform groups.

Provisions in New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s $168.2 billion budget proposal would weaken checks and balances on spending in Albany, according State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli.

New York’s fiscal watchdog released a report Wednesday saying that some aspects of Cuomo’s fiscal plan raise transparency concerns. One proposal empowers the governor’s budget director to cut certain spending by up to 3% if tax collections fall more than $500 million short of budget projections. Additional measures would enable the budget director to impose spending cuts if certain federal funding is slashed by at least $850 million along with broadly authorizing shifts of funds among state agencies and public authorities.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit New York State government watchdog, urged Cuomo in a statement Monday to not rush any major changes to the state’s tax system. CBC president Carol Kellerman said new problems could arise from moving too quickly such as challenges with auditing state-only deductions and adding further complexity to tax rules.

“The proposed voluntary Employer Compensation Expense Tax would be a fundamental change to the state tax system,” said Kellerman. “It will be complex to design and to implement, and it will have many implications that are not yet understood.”

While NYCHA and H+H have their own financial plans, the city has boosted its financial support of both agencies since fiscal 2014. The city waived some reimbursements and assumed the cost of collective bargaining increases and senior centers within NYCHA developments.

Nonprofit watchdog Citizens Budget Commission called on de Blasio to further strengthen NYCHA's finances.

"Declining federal operating subsidies, difficulties increasing rent and non-rent revenues, and high operating costs have caused NYCHA’s fiscal stress," said CBC.

"The city should support NYCHA's efforts to develop new revenue streams and have nonprofit tenants pay rent," said CBC. "Easing work rule restrictions in collective bargaining negotiations and lobbying the federal government to maintain public housing operating and capital subsidies would also stabilize the financial outlook."

New York state lawmakers are aiming to create a “health care shortfall fund” to compensate for unexpected reductions in federal funding. Most of the fund's revenue would be derived from taxing the proceeds from converting nonprofit health plans to for-profit systems.

Many regard this proposal as a way to capitalize on the pending acquisition of Fidelis Care, a nonprofit health plan owned by the state’s Roman Catholic bishops, by Centene Corporation, a Massachusetts for-profit health system.

The $3.75 billion deal was announced in September, and the enactment of such legislation would likely generate $250 million in annual state revenue from Fidelis alone. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, however, has already indicated that the Catholic Church plans to use the proceeds from the Fidelis sale to create a charitable foundation that provides health services to the needy in New York.

The fiscal year 2019 Executive Budget proposed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo would collect an estimated $750 million annually over the next four years by taxing the proceeds from the sale of nonprofit health companies to for-profit health companies.

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The Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a nonpartisan advocacy group, echoed Hammond’s point, saying the state budget deficits were not being addressed through legislative reforms to Medicaid. Rather, the CBC said the state budget gaps relied on “one-time resources” as fixes, including “speculative revenues from possible health insurance company conversions to for-profit entities.”

New York promised $867 million to more than 100 companies in the 2017 fiscal year, an investment that officials say will retain 46,000 jobs and create more than 20,000 new positions, a new report shows.

The report segregates state investments — for downtown revitalization, or advertising — that did not have any clearly attached job creation figures.
Kaehny, as well as the David Friedfel of the Citizens Budget Commission, questioned the report's formatting because there's no clear baseline assessment.

"We were hoping to see per-recipient data, as you'd see in a database of deals," Friedfel, director of state studies for the nonpartisan CBC, wrote in an email. "It only lists 'net new job commitments.' And even with that optimistic view on what will happen in the future, the cost per job ratios for some of these programs is indefensible."

The mood at the Feb. 6 City Council hearing on the breakdown of the Housing Authority’s heating systems was almost as icy as the temperatures several hundred thousand of its residents faced amid those problems for two weeks in January.

The Committee for Public Housing, as well as the one for Oversight and Investigations, grilled NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye, who was in the hot seat at a hearing last December after the city Department of Investigation revealed a month earlier that she falsely reported that the agency had conducted thousands of lead-paint inspections that never happened.

The leader of the embattled agency faced outrage over heating outages that had affected 80 percent of NYCHA residents since Oct. 1. The agency’s boilers, most of which are over 30 years old, were no match for the frigid conditions and a Jan. 4 snowstorm.

NYCHA has $17-billion in unmet capital needs, which the Citizens Budget Commission projected will grow to $25 billion.

The yearly cost of tax breaks given to Long Island companies by Industrial Development Agencies has tripled since 2004, to more than $140 million, fueling calls for reform.

The Island’s eight IDAs are under fire for competing to help the same companies, which increases the amount of their tax benefits, and for not being selective enough.
This expansion has drawn flak from the Citizens Budget Commission, an influential fiscal watchdog in Manhattan.

“There’s been a race to the bottom: IDAs give away taxpayer dollars to businesses that then have to be raised by local governments from other taxpayers, and the economic benefits are questionable,” said David Friedfel, CBC’s state studies director. “They’re just paying businesses to relocate down the road.”

In October, CBC issued a report calling for consolidation of the 109 IDAs across New York into one for each of the state’s 10 regions. New York City is the only region with a single IDA now.

The report’s author, CBC research associate Riley Edwards, said having regional IDAs would reduce competition, which drives up the cost of tax breaks and the number of incentive packages offered to companies.

IDAs “shouldn’t be pulling an existing business from one locale to another. They also shouldn’t be supporting businesses that cannot easily relocate because they have to be where their customers are,” such as car dealerships and other retailers, she said.

Big Apple taxpayers could save more than $160 million a year if the city’s 108 union-administered benefit funds — most of which are operated separately — consolidated their management and purchasing, according to a report released Thursday.

That’s because many of the funds have sky-high administrative expenses, build reserves much larger than needed, and are beset by costly mismanagement, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

“Audits of individual union benefit funds often show serious mismanagement issues — including lack of documentation for millions of dollars in payments,” said CBC President Carol Kellermann.