More than 150,000 moderate- and middle-income households in New York City are still rent burdened, according to a 2015 Citizens Budget Commission policy brief. When families are rent-burdened—meaning they pay more than 30% of household income on rent—they often find it hard to afford other necessities such as health care and child care. Middle-income earners in New York deserve better.

The Citizens Budget Commission watchdog organization will honor U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and public finance veteran Felix Rohatyn at its annual dinner Thursday at the Pierre Hotel in New York.

In New York — Uber’s largest United States market — yellow cab trips are dropping, while the use of ride-hailing services has skyrocketed to about 16 million passengers in October from about five million in June 2015, according to an independent report on ride-hailing apps. The price of a taxi medallion has plummeted, many drivers have abandoned cabs for ride-hailing services and taxis sit idle in garages.
The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent watchdog, has also questioned whether New York can still count on the $1.2 billion in revenue it expects to collect from the future sale of taxi medallions, because their value has sunk.

Cities like New York and San Francisco are facing uncertainty about how to budget for the future. President Donald Trump has said he plans to make drastic budget cuts, and he’s also threatened to withhold federal money from “sanctuary cities.” Are cities running through scenarios where they might not have federal funding?

It's not news that taxi medallions, which were once valued at over a million dollars, have plunged in value to less than half that. Yet Mayor Bill de Blasio's latest budget includes $1.2 billion in revenue from the sale of new medallions — which one watchdog says is unrealistic.

An independent, nonpartisan watchdog said Tuesday that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s proposed budget should end the practice of providing tax breaks to employers, including Hollywood producers, in the face of questionable results in preserving or creating jobs.

Fiscal gimmicks: Kick the can down the road a few times, and those cans start to pile up.

One budget analyst questioned whether the mayor’s goal is already being accomplished by activity in the economy, irrespective of his input.

"The economy's already been creating that on its own, so how's he going to make that happen?" Maria Doulis of the Citizens Budget Commission asked in an interview. "If things continue, then that will happen on its own. What's the baseline he's using to measure for jobs created?"

The CBC has a word for the tweaks in spending and revenue that Gov. Andrew Cuomo used to hold the operating spending increase in his executive budget under 2 percent: “gimmicks.”

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo counts on $1.2 billion in "fiscal gimmicks" to keep spending growth below 2 percent in his proposed 2017 state budget.

The Citizens Budget Commission, an independent nonprofit, released an analysis earlier this month of the Mayor’s Management Report (MMR), a detailed survey of city agencies and their functioning which the Mayor's Office of Operations puts out twice a year. The preliminary version of the report, the PMMR, covering the first four months of the 2017 fiscal year, was released last Monday and will be followed by the full MMR in September.

Expanding design-build's availability to all agencies in the state must be a high priority for Albany in its 2017 session.