ALBANY—U.S.
Rep. Amo Houghton (R-Corning), the only former CEO of a Fortune 500 company
serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and a founder and early leader
of The Business Council, will receive the Corning Award for Excellence
for 2004.
The award,
which is sponsored by Corning Incorporated, will be presented Wednesday,
Sept
Governor
Pataki announced he has vetoed $1.8 billion from the budget
approved by the Legislature, and said the state will still
face a projected budget gap of $6.1 billion in the fiscal
year starting next April 1
Business
Council President Daniel B. Walsh urged Governor Pataki to
veto spending that the Legislature added to this year's budget,
and to insist on cost-saving reforms to Medicaid.
"You
are absolutely right about the budget approved by the Legislature:
It includes too much spending, and too little reform,"
Walsh wrote in an August 18 letter to the Governor
The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC)
has adopted “emergency" regulations to restore
limits on industrial emissions that were overturned by a state
Supreme Court in May.
DEC’s own estimates showed that these stringent emission
rules, which will require additional reductions of sulfur
dioxide and nitrogen emissions at power plants, will raise
statewide wholesale power rates by 5 percent, according Ken
Pokalsky, director of environmental and economic development
programs for The Council
A closely watched index of employment expectations among
New York manufacturers “dropped markedly,” the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Buffalo Branch reported
in its latest monthly analysis.
The analysis found that the index for the average employee
work week, which The Wall Street Journal calls a
“telltale” for future hiring, dropped from 22
ALBANYUpstate New York taxpayers paid as much as $6 billion more in state and local taxes than they would in an average state, mostly because of the state's far-above-average levels of spending on Medicaid and local government payrolls, a new report from The Public Policy Institute of New York State shows
State
Senate and Assembly members approved a 2004-05 budget that
would add as much as $1 billion or more in spending, and hundreds
of millions in new borrowing, to Governor Pataki's proposed
fiscal plan.
The Governor said the Legislature's budget is too costly and
will require him to veto some of the additional spending
In
a victory for The Business Council, New York's manufacturing
sector, and the environment, the state Legislature has repealed
an onerous fee on businesses doing environmental cleanups.
This
surcharge, imposed as part of last year's Brownfield Act,
could add up to $1,000 or more for every dump truck load of
contaminated soil removed from brownfield sites, and was expected
to add at least $20 million per year to the cost of brownfields
and other cleanup projects in New York
Less
than a month after the state Insurance Department rejected
a proposal to increase average workers' comp premiums by 29
percent, the department has received a new request to increase
ratesthis time, by 9.5 percent
Five
Republican state Senators were endorsed by the union-funded
Working Families Party the day the Senate agreed to increase
New York's minimum wage by 39 percent, the New York Sun
reported.
The
union party had nominated challengers to the five incumbents
only days before, but arranged for the challengers to bow
out in favor of the Republican candidates, according to the
newspaper