Malvernites Therese Lendino and Laura Casini started the next chapter of their lives where the first began — on Queens Boulevard, near Borough Hall and the Criminal Court House. It was there …
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By Lee Landor
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8/1/11
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Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo launched the Long Island Regional Economic Development Council on July 27 to redesign the relationship between the state government and businesses, in order to stimulate regional economic development and create jobs statewide.
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By Jackie Nash
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7/27/11
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New York state government has a well-deserved reputation for ineffectiveness. Ask most New Yorkers what one word best describes Albany, and the most common response would be “dysfunctional.” That’s the term that New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice used in a study in 2004, in its follow-up in 2006 and in its 2008 update, “Still Broken.”
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7/7/11
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Politics is a quirky business. This is the story of six governors who have proposed similar programs aimed at cutting expenses and holding the line on taxes, with completely different reactions from the voters.
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7/7/11
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This one was never in doubt. Legislation that will put a cap on property tax levies passed by a 57-to-5 margin in the State Senate before it made it through the Assembly and was signed into law by …
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By Fran Berkman and Lee Landor
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7/6/11
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With a vote in the Senate of 33-29, New York became the sixth state in the nation to allow same-sex marriage — but the nine senators from Long Island, all Republican, voted against the bill, …
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By Mary Malloy
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6/29/11
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State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos says he is optimistic that despite the difficult choices they face, this is the year when Albany lawmakers will finally make the structural changes to the state budget needed to rein in spending.
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Judy Rattner
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3/9/11
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I have to admit, I’m having a problem understanding how, in just 33 working days, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Medicaid Redesign Team was able to recommend 79 cost cutting measures to save $2.3 billion in the upcoming budget. I’ll address this concern from three viewpoints.
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Hal Peterson
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3/9/11
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My last column, “Stop playing games with the budget deficit” (Feb. 3) was written one week before New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli issued his analysis of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive budget draft.
The irrationality I outlined fell short of anticipating the following mea-culpa expressed in the comptroller’s analysis. “The SFY 2010-2011 enacted budget relied on $16.7 billion in non-recurring or temporary budget resources; and overly optimistic tax revenue projections, causing a dramatically worsened state structural deficit.” How dramatic? These tenuous entries constituted 30 percent of all the monies in the state’s operating fund.
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Hal Peterson
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2/23/11
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With the inauguration of Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Saturday, New York state officially ended its brief but disastrous Spitzer era. Eliot Spitzer, the former attorney general, was elected governor in 2006 in a landslide and then entered office not to make friends in Albany, not even to govern, but to rule the land. He crashed and burned in one of the country’s most notorious sex scandals, after which he resigned and Lt. Gov. David Paterson assumed the state’s reins.
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1/10/11
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