On Saturday, the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) got the terms of its new $47.5 million contract with the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents 3,000 bus drivers in Queens and Staten Island.

The agreement shows that arbitrators — who decide such things when both sides reach an impasse — remain unruffled by the financial, economic, and fiscal crises that have plagued the state over the past half-decade.

The verdict: Gov. Cuomo still needs to enact labor-negotiation reform. (more…)

Forty-nine school districts* were seeking to override the state’s new property tax cap in yesterday’s school budget votes. Of those, our review of regional media coverage suggests 30 districts* passed an override, while 19 districts voted their budgets down. Seven of the proposed overrides failed to collect even 50 percent of the vote.

The table below shows each district along with unofficial vote tallies. (more…)

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s propensity for creating advisory committees, commissions and task forces — more than two dozen in all — is the subject of an article in today’s Wall Street Journal [subscription required].

Says Cuomo’s press spokesman:

“The commissions and advisory panels bring together unprecedented talent, experience and expertise in order to devise bold and consensus solutions to the most critical challenges facing the state and, under the governor’s leadership, it [sic] has been an unequivocal success.”

Well, at least he didn’t call it “historic.”

(more…)

New York will (one presumes) have a new mayor come January 2014. One question for that mayor will be whether he or she chooses the past or the present.

The (future) present: the new mayor likely will face a deficit of $3.7 billion for his or her inaugural budget (fiscal year 2015). That’s a good seven percent of city tax revenues.

The past: unless Mayor Bloomberg and municipal unions do some serious negotiating in the next few months, the new mayor will face more than a dozen expired contracts — and union leaders requesting retroactive settlements. (more…)

The fact that markets are flat after la crise JPMorgan Chase came to light — and that JPM stock is down only 7.3 percent as of this writing — shouldn’t be a comfort to anyone.

The takeaway isn’t that the financial and economic worlds are more robust than they were four years ago and better able to handle such shocks.

Nor does this massive and purportedly unexpected loss prove that the Obama financial regulations are working. Taking that angle, a few people are saying that the mess points up the need for Dodd-Frank’s Volcker rule, which would ban proprietary trading by banks.

(Under this line or reasoning, the problem with the Volcker Rule is only that regulators haven’t implemented it yet — banks may have until 2014 to comply — and that the rule may contain too many exceptions.)

What the calm markets prove is that people and companies have gotten used to the fact that the global financial system remains utterly broken. It’s priced in, as they say. (more…)

Former NYC traffic commissioner, ex-cabbie, and all-around legend “Gridlock Sam” Sam Schwartz had an intriguing piece in today’s Daily News on “how to fix New York City traffic.”

Schwartz sees the problem as being “the maddening illogic” of how New York tolls its bridges and tunnels.

The city and state (via public authorities) toll people going from one relatively sparsely populated part of an outer borough to another, and “we toll everybody driving to Staten Island as if it were one giant central business district.”

But people don’t pay tolls to come over the bridges from Brooklyn to core Manhattan. (more…)

Nicole Gelinas — Manhattan Institute senior fellow, City Journal contributing editor and frequent blogger here — wrote a tough column in the New York Post yesterday, criticizing Governor Cuomo’s nomination of former Governor David Paterson for appointment to an open seat on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) board.  The choice, Nicole said, was tantamount to “business-as-usual New York — on track to a crumbling transit system,” and she said Paterson deserved most of the blame for the disastrously costly contract arbitration award to the Transit Workers Union (TWU) in 2009.

Paterson took exception — and, to his credit, invited Nicole to discuss the issue on his live afternoon radio talk show on WOR-710 in New York City.  The result is a fascinating 22-minute discussion (starting at the 5:10 mark of this link, downloadable as a podcast).

At the outset of the interview, the former governor said he actually agreed with one point in Nicole’s article: her contention that Paterson should have pushed to raise the transit workers’ retirement age, now 55 and untouched by Cuomo’s Tier 6 pension plan.  But the former governor took strong exception to her assertion that he had failed to take a strong position against a raise for the TWU, claiming he had publicly opposed raises for any public sector workers during the 2008-09 fiscal crisis.

(more…)

SNL Financial has a characteristically solid report out analyzing Wall Street firms’ latest results, which trickled in last week.

One verdict to take away (although the analysts do not directly draw this conclusion): Wall Street could be smaller and more volatile. That’s not a good thing for New York City and State. (more…)

Wendy Long, a lawyer who is trying to oust fellow lawyer Kirsten Gillibrand from the Senate, has a piece in the WSJ today with a compelling headline: “Financial Regulation is Hurting New York.”

True enough. But the 70 percent of the details that Long gets wrong eclipse the 30 percent that she gets right. A more fitting story might be “Pols Who Don’t Understand the Financial Crisis are Hurting New York.” (more…)

While New York State’s new property tax cap has a starting point of 2 percent (or the prior year’s average inflation rate, whichever is less), it will vary from school district to school district based on a series of exclusions for capital expenditures, increases in pension costs, and physical additions to the district tax base. Heading towards the first annual school budget votes to be affected by the tax cap, districts were required to submit their estimates of the adjusted “levy limit” to the comptroller’s office earlier this month. The results can be found in this spreadsheet.

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