I've been reading about the negotiations between the current State Senate majority leader, Dean Skelos, and the "Gang of Three," Sen. Carl Kruger, Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr., and Senator-elect Pedro Espada Jr., over control of the State Senate. I have a question for those who consider themselves Republicans,Democrats, "conservatives," "proggressives," the Manhattan Institute, the Fiscal Policy Institute, the New York Times, the New York Post, etc. Anyone want to take ownership of these guys, and say that the four of them are working for their values?

The future of New York, City and State, has been severely diminished by the self dealing of the past, including the recent past. But we can at least be thankful that Bloomberg, Paterson, Silver, Skelos and Quinn are not proposing a stunt like this.  New Jersey's pension funds have only half the money needed to pay benefits, even given an assumed rate of return they'll never get, and unlike in New York it was taxpayers unwilling to pay taxes rather than public employees seeking pension sweeteners that get the lion's share of the blame.  So what is being proposed in the Garden State?  Keeping taxes down by taking (another) "holiday" from required pension contributions! 

There is no question that Upstate metropolitan areas have their problems. Once among the most dynamic and forward-thinking areas of the United States, the region has been living off the former prosperity generated by older companies, a prosperity that is passing away with those companies due to economic change. Employment has been kept steady by the growth of government and government-dependent sectors such as health care, and low-paid retail and services. The average private sector worker in the Upstate metro counties (Albany, Broome, Dutchess, Erie, Monroe, Niagara, Oneida, Onondaga, Orange, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Schenectady) earned 11.4% less than the average for the United States in 2007. In the post-air conditioning “Sunbelt” era, an era ironically abated by Syracuse-based air conditioner maker Carrier (who even needs air conditioning up there?), the beautiful lakes and trees and abundance water of our northern interior states have been thought by millions of Americans to be less desirable than warmer, southern states that get more sunshine and less snow. So to be fair, I’ve compared the local government employment and payroll of the Upstate Metro counties with several other older, urbanized, cold-weather manufacturing-based counties across the country -- Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Cuyahoga (Cleveland), Franklin (Columbus OH), Wayne (Detroit), Milwaukee and Hennepin (Minneapolis). In 2007, all had far fewer local government employees per 100,000 residents than the Upstate NY metro counties, with the exception of…

In my previous post, I used employment and payroll data from the 2007 Census of Governments, described in my first post on the subject, to compare New York City with other older central cities. In this post I compare full time equivalent local government employment per 100,000 residents and March 2007 pay per employee for New York’s Downstate Suburban counties -- Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam -- with other suburban counties with large job bases in the Northeast Corridor. To Fairfield County in Connecticut, also presented in the initial table, I add Middlesex County outside Boston, Montgomery County outside Philadelphia, Baltimore County outside the City of Baltimore, and Montgomery County MD and Fairfax County VA outside Washington DC. With the exception of one of these counties, local government is clearly more expensive in the Downstate Suburbs than in other northeastern suburban counties, due to higher employment levels, particularly for schools, roads and police, higher pay, or both. Even in that county, moreover, the total cost of government may be lower due to lower debts, less rich pensions, and a less expensive Medicaid program that is not shifted to the local level. But looking just at those on the local government payroll, the suburban county where there are even more local government workers earning more money than in the New York Suburbs is…

As everyone is by now aware, with Hillary Clinton accepting President-Elect Obama’s nomination to Secretary of State (dumb move Hillary – you should’ve declined and stayed in the Senate), Governor David Paterson has the constitutional duty to appoint the new Senator from New York to replace her.

Faddish Web 2.0-oriented consultants often advise their clients to be ubiquitous on the Internet (I know I have).  So it's not surprising that in the last ten days I (and I assume thousands of other New Yorkers) received email invitations from Bill Thompson to be his friend/join his network on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and, today, Digg.

I'm finding myself on edge waiting for the Comptroller's Twitter feed.

Looks like Joe Mercurio, the oft-quoted NY political consultant, was the one who carried out the National Republican Trust PAC's drive-by hit on Obama late in the campaign.

FactCheck.org accused the National Republican Trust PAC of producing "one of the sleaziest false TV ads of the campaign." That would be the "Obama Hearts Mohammed Atta" one. The NRT PAC's other ads were just as despicable.

The NRT PAC, registered with the FEC on 9/29/08, paid the Philipse Brook Group at least $5.3 million between 10/15 and 11/4 for media buys.

Ever since I started tabulating and analyzing data from the Governments division of the U.S. Census Bureau in the early 1990s, I’ve found that the results are something that no one of any political persuasion has wanted to see. My former supervisors at City planning once presented the data, along with a bunch of other information, to former NYC economic development czar John Dyson. He was so upset that most of NYC’s extra local government taxes as a share of personal income, over and above the U.S. average, went to categories of spending that no business person would consider “public services” that he started ranting “New York stinks” at a conference that very evening. When presented with the same data his boss, former Mayor Giuliani, was not happy to see that NYC’s staffing and spending levels were so high for police and low for education, given that he wanted to make them higher and lower respectively. A housing advocate and city planner grew upset with me when I pointed out New York City’s comparatively high spending on housing and low spending on services such as education and parks, accusing me of immorally “trading off one need against another,” as if that wasn’t what the data showed had already happened. And when I presented the data to the City Planning Commission as part of the preparation of the charter-mandated Planning and Zoning Report, former commissioner Ron Shiffman felt the comparison with the U.S. average made NYC look unfairly bad. “At least compare us with other cities for God’s sake,” I recall him saying. Very well Professor Shiffman, this post and the attached tables contain the comparison you asked for.

In an unusual moment, Mayor Bloomberg was left in an embarassing position over the past two weeks.  First, he announced that he would not be mailing out the property tax rebate to New York City homeowners.  Then, his Budget Director announced at a City Council hearing that the Mayor does not have the authority to hold back those checks.  Then the Mayor responded by saying he would not mail the checks out until June.  Ouch!!

I have been quite critical of Bloomberg in the past few months.  I found his power grab for a third term to be an outrageous act of hubris.  While he has been, in my mind, a satisfactory Mayor, the City could go on with new leadership.  Without letting that single act shade my objectivity, I must say that Bloomberg has it right on the rebate.

In the spreadsheet attached to this post, I provided tables of comparative data on local government employment and pay for different parts of New York State in March 2007, along with the data and capacity to quickly make similar comparisons with major counties around the country. The sources and tabulation methods are explained in that post. Attached to this post is a table that takes similar information I compiled five years ago, when the 2002 Census of Governments was released, and compares it with 2007 for the United States; New York City; the downstate suburban counties (Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam); the mostly highly urbanized Upstate NY counties (Albany, Broome, Dutchess, Erie, Monroe, Niagara, Oneida, Onondaga, Orange, Rensselaer, Saratoga, and Schenectady); the other more rural Upstate New York counties; and the total for New Jersey. The data show that full time equivalent local government employment per 100,000 people rose 1.4% in the United States from 2002 to 2007. For New York City it fell 4.3%, for the Downstate Suburbs it rose 8.2%, for the Upstate Metro counties it rose 1.1%, for the rest of New York State it rose 2.9%, and for New Jersey it rose 5.4%. Needless to say, I am not surprised.

I saw here that Joe Gentili's memorial service will be December 3,and wanted to express my regret at the passing of one of the great, mad mechanics of New York's old-fashioned, patronage-dominated Board of Elections.

I wrote about Gentili, a Brooklyn Republican, back in January of 2003 in the late lamented New York Sun, when his tenure asthe agency's acting chief -- which began with the sudden heart attack of his friend and predecessor, Danny DeFranccesco, two days after 9/11.