The New York Public Interest Research Group, a student-directed organization, is against the 5 percent tuition hike proposed by the State University of New York trustees this week, said Rebecca J. Weber, executive director. The state should fund SUNY sufficiently so trustees don’t have to seek a tuition hike, she said.

“A tuition hike is very, very difficult for students. Financial aid doesn’t cover costs. It’s very, very hard,” she said.

SUNY is requesting an 8.5 percent increase—$99.8 million—over its current $1.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for its state-operated campuses and system administration. The last time tuition at SUNY’s four-year schools went up was in 2003, when it was raised 28 percent to $4,350 a year for in-state students.

With small, regular tuition hikes, which SUNY is looking at, there’s no protection for students against large increases if the state has a bad budget year, Weber said. “The difficulty with that concept is that it provides a floor in terms of a regular tuition hike but not a ceiling,” she said.

NYPIRG has an ally in its anti-hike stance in Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco, R-Schenectady. Tedisco put out a news release today saying he is against both the SUNY plan and the proposed toll increase on the New York State Thruway. Read more of this entry »

   A lawsuit by state judges who want a raise can proceed, a state Supreme Court judge in Albany ruled Friday.

The ruling by Judge Thomas J. McNamara means that the case can proceed to trial, said Steven Cohn, the lawyer representing the judges.

 Cohn said a conference has been set for Dec. 19 to determine a trial date. “Basically it means he found some merit to the allegations in our complaint,’’ Cohn said.

  Judges haven’t had a raise since 1999. The suit, which raise the novel issue of how can a judge preside over a case that may give him a raise, would hike the pay of Supreme Court judges from $136,700 a year to $165,000.

United University Professions executive board has appointed Frederick Floss, an economics and finance professor on leave from Buffalo State College, as acting president of the 33,000-member union until an election is held in February to replace William Scheuerman. The unexpired term runs until May 31, 2009. Scheuerman resigned this week to take a job as president of the National Labor College in Maryland.

Floss, UUP’s vice president of academics, is a candidate for president of the 33,000-member union, which represents academic and professional faculty on 29 State University of New York campuses.

The board appointed Kenneth Kallio, an associate professor and psychology department chairman at Geneseo State College, as acting vice president for academics. Kallio chairs the union’s Elections and Credentials Committee and, like Floss, is a member of the contract negotiating team for UUP, the largest higher-education union in the country.

The state Health Department just released a five-page spreadsheet on how hospitals and nursing facilities around New York are progressing in terms of complying with the December 2006 health-care downsizing report by the Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century—a.k.a. the Berger Commission. The commission, whose recommendations became law on Jan. 1, called for nearly 50 hospitals to be restructured, nine hospitals to close and about 3,000 nursing home beds to be shut down.

“Implementing the Berger Commission’s recommendations is critical to making health care in New York more efficient, affordable and patient focused,” Gov. Eliot Spitzer said in a statement. “We are already seeing tremendous progress with respect to implementation and beginning to feel the transformative effects.”

The Health Department highlighted some success stories:
—Three of nine hospitals slated for closure shut down ahead of schedule, including two in Manhattan and one in Schenectady.
—Kingston Hospital and Benedictine Hospital in Ulster County reached a joint governance agreement.
—The Kaleida Health System and Erie County Medical Center developed a unified governance structure, as did Crouse Hospital and SUNY Upstate Medical University in Onondaga County. Read more of this entry »

Patient advocates blamed the state yesterday for the problem of growing medical-malpractice costs, saying government has failed to rein in costs associated with medical-malpractice insurance and failing to weed out poor-performing doctors from the system.

College professors from across the state came out against the state’s using the latest technology to replace its 20,000 decades-old mechanical voting machines.

The Committee for an Independent Public Defense System alleged yesterday that public defenders in some upstate counties are not providing adequate legal representation of the poor.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who is conducting an audit of the New York State Thruway, said yesterday he would recommend a “pathway” for the public authority to save money by shedding functions not related to running the 641-mile toll-road system.

Albany is abuzz with talk of Vanity Fair contributing editor David Margolick’s 8,000-word article on Gov. Eliot Spitzer titled “The Year of Governing Dangerously.”

Orange County Republican Howard Mills, a former state insurance superintendent who unsuccessfully ran for Democratic U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer’s seat in 2004, said he would not run against U.S. Rep. John Hall, D-Dover Plains, for the 19th Congressional District seat next year.

New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly gave a tongue-in-cheek plastic pigeon award to a councilman who has fought to control the messy birds in the city.

This week’s installment tackles Gov. Spitzer’s make-up party with Democrats and why tolls are increasing on the state Thruway.

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   No one at the Board of Elections saw it coming, but commissioners learned today that the requirement for prospective voting-machine vendors to disclose political contributions conflicts with a new state ethics law. The law trumps agency regulations. Board members said they would work with the Legislature on an amendment to the legislation.

The new ethics-reform legislation prohibits statewide elected officials, state officers and employees involved in awarding state contracts from asking current or prospective vendors about their political affiliation, campaign contributions and votes in elections.

The purpose of the Board of Elections’ requirement for disclosure on political donations was to let the public know who the vendors potentially were trying to influence. The department required two years’ worth of campaign-finance data.

Elections Commissioner Douglas Kellner said lawmakers were attempting to correct “an abuse where government contracts were being given out to campaign contributors.

“And so it’s a good thing to reform that process. But they didn’t realize that with the broad language that they also in effect overrode what was a very good provision in the state board regulatinos that required that all voting-system equipment vendors make disclosures of their political contributions,” he said.

Political contributions from the vendors are on the agency’s Web site if they’re made in New York, but the companies have a national base, and the regulation required information on campaign donations in ever state.

“We  just want to make sure that we cut out the bad and let the good in,” Commissioner Neil Kelleher said.

Barbara Bartoletti of the League of Women Voters said the elections regulation was in place for a good reason and the Legislature should allow it back in.

The State University of New York is asking for a $9 billion state investment in its infrastructure in the next five years, its largest and most ambitious capital plan yet.

Some lawmakers want the Thruway Authority to forgo the need for a toll hike in January by handing the money-losing canal system back to the state.

Senate Republicans are fighting Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s attempts to quash subpoenas issued to his administration over whether gubernatorial aides sought to produce documents damaging to Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, Rensselaer County. The Senate is investigating the Troopergate scandal.

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli will propose a budget reform plan during a speech at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany.

A coalition of Democratic lawmakers wants the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to delay a toll hike until at least April 15 to give lawmakers time to negotiate with the governor and try to avoid an increase for as long as possible.

Energy companies are preparing for what is expected to be a tough fight in the 2008 legislative session on whether to re-regulate the utility industry.

Four Tompkins County anti-war activists convicted of trespassing at U.S. Rep. John “Randy” Kuhl’s office in Bath, Steuben County, escaped jail terms and a fifth received 30 days in the county jail because he wouldn’t pay a fine or perform community service. Kuhl is a Republican from Hammondsport, Steuben County.

In Endicott, Broome County, negotiations to reach a settlement on claims related to pollution from the former IBM factory have failed, and attorneys and clients plan to file a lawsuit in January.

Broadway theater owners and producers and stagehands reached a settlement yesterday after a grueling 19-day strike that crippled most Broadway shows.

Fans and critics of Eliot Spitzer will be running out to newsstands today to grab the new Vanity Fair magazine (or going to http://www.vanityfair.com) to view veteran political journalist David Margolick’s take on the governor’s first year in office.

Like other observers, Margolick comments on the huge promise Spitzer came into office with almost a year ago, which he then then seemed to fritter it all away in a series of political blunders caused mostly by his overweening ego and taste for battle. But he concludes that the freshman governor may still present the best chance to actually change the Capitol’s famously dysfunctional culture.

But unlike newspaper commentaries, Margolick gets to strinkle his tome with obscenties that tansmit more of the flavor of some of the governor’s confrontations.

The State University of New York is proposing a 2008-09 budget that would raise tuition 5 percent and begin a three-year process to hire 1,000 new professors.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer told Democratic lawmakers at a meeting yesterday that he supports pay hikes.

The governor’s Budget Division is holding a “town hall” meeting Friday to talk about and solicit ideas for closing the projected $4.3 billion budget gap and spend the state’s money next year.

The Spitzer administration recently ordered charter schools—which are publicly funded private institutions—to start paying union wages on all construction, repair and maintenance projects, prompting a lawsuit from several schools.

The state Health Department is considering policy changes following disclosure that a Long Island anesthesiologist’s misuse of syringes put hundreds of patients at risk for hepatitis and HIV.

State Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins’ husband died of kidney failure Monday. Stewart-Cousins is a first-term Democratic senator from Yonkers.

Although hospitals statewide are being scaled down, the Rochester area may need more beds.

The Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport’s October enplanements are the highest they’ve been in seven years.

A Niagara Falls judge was removed from office in connection with a March 2005 court session, in which he ordered that 46 people be jailed when no one would own up to being the culprit for a ringing cell phone in the courtroom. Cell phone and page use are prohibited in the chamber.