Photo courtesy of City & State.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, back from a fishing tripon Long Island, went on Fred Dicker’s radio program today and aggressively  promoted his plan to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge.

The plan for the bridge’s replacement has been criticized by several different opposition groups, the New York Times wrote late last month, with environmental advocates worried about the dredging process intrinsic to the project, and local lawmakers insisting that a plan for mass transit be included in the $5.2 billion bridge construction.

Today, Cuomo said that mass transit would double the cost of the bridge replacement and the controversy was an impediment to progress.

“I think the Tappan Zee is a good example of a larger problem that we have that is pervasive,” he said.
“We talk about gridlock…There’s another form of gridlock, which is just the lack of capacity for government, for society through government to implement big projects. When you have a big project,you will always have opposition,” he said.

“Do you allow the opposition and the controversy to defeat the project or not? If controversy  always wins, we build nothing,” he said.

UPDATED: The Tri-State Transportation Campaign mailed out a release this afternoon questioning the Cuomo administration’s cost estimates for a bus rapid transit system on the Tappan Zee. The release says the Campaign FOIL-ed for information on the projected costs.

“New York State never analyzed the price of a simple bus rapid transit (BRT) system for the new Tappan Zee Bridge and I-287 corridor, according to a preliminary Tri-State Transportation Campaign analysis of state documents. Documents obtained on June 18, 2012 in response to the Campaign’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request, indicate the state’s cost assumptions for BRT instead rely on projections for a more elaborate, fully built-out configuration.”

To read the full article at City & State click here.

via talentmanagement.com

One of the more controversial proposals being floated in Albany is the idea of giving all 212 (soon to be 213) lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly a pay raise.

The New York Post‘s Fred Dicker reported the amount of a potential raise as $100,000, a substantial jump from the lawmakers’ current base salary of $79,500.

While the Governor has said there is no deal on a pay raise, even a slight whiff of the possibility that there could be one stirs up controversy, based in part on the idea that lawmakers shouldn’t increase their own salaries during the nationwide recession. The opposition isn’t necessarily rooted in the actual costs of the proposed increase. So how much would it cost?

The state’s total budget this year was $132.5 billion and lawmakers’ salaries cost $19.7 million, a figure that includes their leadership stipends, also known as “lulus” (listed below).

A hypothetical pay raise to $100,000 for 212 lawmakers plus an additional senator would add $4,446,000 every year to the state’s budget.

It’s not so much in the grand scheme of a $132.5 billion budget, but as Hank Sheinkopf told the Times-Union,

“It’s not generally a good idea to do in an election year and a recession. No good can come from it,” Sheinkopf said.

To read the full article at City & State click here.

*  The redistricting battle rages on as the defendants in a lawsuit challenging the state’s Senate and Assembly lines were forced to answer amended complaints from the plaintiffs. As Times-Union’s Jimmy Vielkind pointed out yesterday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has retained counsel from the firm of Zuckerman Spaeder, which now employs ex-Cuomo Secretary Steve Cohen. The attorney named on the case is Cohen’s partner Paul Shechtman, who taught Cohen in law school. Shechtman’s answer to the more than 100 different stipulations in the amended complaints consists largely declining to answer. There are only a handful of items the governor’s answer admits: the Constitution did create a Senate, and part of the Constitution addresses the Senate’s size; Nassau County used to be part of Queens in the 19th century; that a Constitutional Convention did take place in 1894; and that New York and Brooklyn were “fast growing metropolises”; that LATFOR held public hearings in 2001, and that LATFOR holds hearings in general.

To read the full article at City & State click here.