Ken Girardin

Good morning! Today could go down in history as the most expensive day ever for NY taxpayers. Public employee unions are right now headed to Albany to pressure Gov. Hochul into retroactively sweetening their pensions and slashing their retirement age to 55. Some background...🧵

A simple new feature on a Labor Department website that cost under $600 to create has made it much more user-friendly for union members to see how their dues are being spent. Some examples:

@OldSaltCityAce @CityJournal They set the delivery rates and taxes. Supply costs fluctuate.

@PolicyEngineer @CityJournal Fix it? Ken, the politicians SET the rates!

🔌NY is being clobbered by high electricity prices. The average bill rose 47% from 2019 to 2025 (around Syracuse, it doubled!). And they're still rising. There were many causes. As I explain in @cityjournal, NY needs a coherent plan to fix it, but its pols don't yet have one.🧵

NYC's push for new taxes has the same problem as its pension amortization effort: it invites the question "if they're looking to do this now, while the economy is growing, instead of controlling their spending, what will they do if the economy shrinks?"

@JimmyVielkind Most secessionism is populist jingoism. That said, Gov. Lamont should use any and all means to liberate the people living in occupied Granby (claimed by Southwick, Massachusetts because of a dishonest survey). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwick…

@PolicyEngineer My favorite argument against NYC secession goes something like this: "That's a nice watershed you've got there. How much per gallon is it worth to you?"

NY Republicans often enjoy a mental exercise looking at how much better (lower-taxed) upstate or Long Island would be if they were their own state. Yet they refuse to criticize the actual cost-drivers (Taylor Law, prevailing wage, etc) they'd supposedly love to be free from.

Gov. Hochul has been playing the public role of mediator, but if there's a strike, she should take a firm stance on the side of riders and taxpayers. She has already taken the arrows: she should publicly go into detail about how inefficient the union contracts are.

The Long Island Railroad still runs like it's 1955 (when it was a private company subject to federal labor rules). If LIRR unions strike, LIRR will no longer be subject to the insane, inefficient work-rules (engineers getting extra day's pay) driving up fares.

My prediction: the strike will happen. The LIRR unions are turning down the MTA's latest offer in part because they are being goaded by the NYC subway union, which (strike or no strike) wants to use a future LIRR deal to increase the floor for the next subway contract.

@LIOversight The wholesale electricity market is federally regulated. Very little room for state-level obstruction.

@PolicyEngineer Assuming New York would continue selling to New New York or whatever they’d call it

@LIOversight Not a deal-breaker. Massachusetts gets about half its electricity from imports.

@PolicyEngineer They would have no way of generating their own electricity!

So proficiency is up 66 percent too, right?

There's a good chance this costs NYC more than the $110M that @NYCMayor was forecasting in his latest financial plan.

@NassauExec How can New York push its electricity prices back down? -freeze, and start paring back, the added renewable/transmission/storage mandates (be ready for a court fight) -pull out of RGGI -strip utility rates down to essentials: no more "demonstrations" or prevailing wage -frack

@NassauExec Bringing NY's electricity rates down in line with Pennsylvania's would be a very good (and, in the long-run, achievable) goal. But that would be a roughly one-quarter reduction in rates, not one-half as Blakeman claims he could.