The Republican Senate Majority has proposed mandate relief and tort reform as key parts of a sweeping proposal to help local governments operate better and cut costs.

"This package of budget and legislative proposals represents real relief from frivolous lawsuits, increased pension costs, growing Medicaid expenses and a broad range of other mandates that are costing local governments and taxpayers billions of dollars," Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno said.

The Senate proposal cited landmark research by The Business Council's research affiliate, The Public Policy Institute, in proposing several long-time Business Council tort-reform priorities. These include:

• Repealing joint and several liability, under which a defendant can be forced to pay all damages even if its liability is determined to be minimal.
• Creating a $250,000 cap on non-economic damages in tort cases.
• Extending jurisdiction of the state Court of Claims to include suits against localities. Suits against the state are already heard in this court, in which the excessive verdicts common in other civil courts are almost unheard of.

"Every sector of New York's economy is affected by the threat of virtually open-ended liability created by the state's current tort laws and unfortunately municipalities throughout our state face the brunt of this out of control system," said Senator Dale M. Volker. "Just about everybody loses in the ongoing game of lawsuit lottery."

The Senate also proposed:

• Reform of the state's notorious Wicks Law, which needlessly inflates the costs of public construction projects by requiring multiple contractors on projects with total estimated costs of more than $50,000. The Senate proposed a phased-in increase in this threshold.
  
  
• Various mandate relief proposals, including: authorizing credit card payments of taxes, fees and civil penalties to municipalities; removing state Comptroller approval from many purely local decisions; easing service mergers and sharing property taxes for local governments; exempting New York City schools from state procurement laws; authorizing local governments to accept bids electronically; and others.
  
  
• A constitutional amendment to prohibit state laws that would impose unfunded mandates on local governments and school districts.
  
  
• Restructuring the state pension system to allow localities to amortize over five years an increase in their pension contributions over 25 percent. Counties would also be permitted to issue debt for local contributions for the Early Retirement and Incentive Program enacted in 2002.
  
  
• Eliminating the requirement that counties pay the state nearly $172 million that was advanced to counties over the last several years for Medicaid, and measures to crack down on Medicaid fraud and abuse.

The $163 Lightbulb, a 1999 book by Robert Ward of The Public Policy Institute of New York State, concluded that broad mandate reform in Albany could save local taxpayers as much as $5 billion a year.