Media Links

March 9, 2011

March 8, 2011

  • Source: WPIX 11
  • Source: Streetsblog
    The two houses of Congress were so much at odds over the Republicans’ proposed spending cuts that they needed two more weeks to bicker about it. So last week, they pushed off a little longer final passage of the budget for a fiscal year that started five months ago. But in order to even pass that measly two-week extension, Democrats needed to accede to $4 billion in cuts.

    About a quarter of those cuts were to transportation. But it’s not as bad as it sounds.

    The biggest chunk is $650 million of general fund spending for transportation. But remember, the baseline budget that this money is being cut from is the FY2010 budget. No allocation from the general fund was ever requested for 2011, so this isn’t a real cut since it wouldn’t have been in the 2011 budget in any case. As the Appropriations Committee puts it, “Removing these funds will have no impact on the authorized, mandatory side of the highway program and its limitation of obligations.”

    The two-week cuts also targeted unspent earmarks from 2010, including $22 million for HUD Neighborhood Initiatives, $173 million for HUD Economic Development Initiative, $293 million for surface transportation “priorities” and $25 million for rail line relocation.

    That all adds up to $1.16 billion in cuts to transportation and urban development. But really, it’s a lesson that when members of Congress advertise to their fiscally-conservative constituencies that they’re cutting money from the budget, sometimes the money they’re “cutting” was never really there in the first place.

  • Source: Albany Watch - Journal-News

    Here’s one you don’t see often: An ad from health-care groups and unions in favor of a governor’s budget cuts. But here is it, a television ad that started over the weekend by 1199 SEIU and Greater New York Hospital Association, the two most powerful health-care groups in Albany.

  • Source: Streetsblog
    In amendments to the state budget released last week, the Cuomo administration claims that its $100 million raid on dedicated MTA funds was a one-time deal that won’t be repeated in the next three years.
  • Source:
    The Wisconsin AFL-CIO is firing back at Gov. Scott Walker's (R) Monday press conference, in which he attacked state Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D) and his caucus for not returning to the state -- and accused Dems of secretly taking their marching orders from the unions instead of having real negotiations. In response, the union says Walker is the one who isn't negotiating in good faith -- and is also the one who was caught on a phone call with someone he believed to be an out-of-state backer.
  • Source: 1010 WINS

    Legislator Kevan Abrahams and transportation advocates want Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano to negotiate with the MTA.

  • Source: NY Times
    A suit over a bicycle path incorporates criticism of the city’s overall approach in carrying out the initiatives of the transportation commissioner.
  • Source: WNBC 4

    View more videos at: http://www.nbcnewyork.com.

    Passengers already bombarded with ads inside the train would look out the windows and see a series of images, seemingly static until the motion of the train springs them to life, like a flip book.

  • Source: Second Avenue Sagas
    Every few months, the benches in the subway system — those sometimes-convenient, often-dirty wooden slabs that provide a few minutes’ respite while the subway comes — sneak their way into a news story.
  • Source: Albany Watch - Journal News
    Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, has gone back and forth over the odds of keeping the so-called millionaires tax, a surcharge on earners who make more than $200,000. But following Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan’s petition released this morning, Silver’s office released a statement this evening calling for the tax to stay. “The Speaker wholeheartedly agrees that [...]

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  • Source: NY Daily NEws
    Here's a way to balance state budgets that should appeal to union members and Tea Partyers alike: End corporate welfare as we know it.