Michael Bloomberg wants to cut more than a billion dollars from next year's budget, and $550 million from this current budget, according to a letter to the heads of city agencies (and reporters) this afternoon.
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Testifying at a City Council hearing about Michael Bloomberg’s executive budget, city budget director Mark Page was just asked about the proposal to lift the sales-tax exemption that excludes clothing purchases under $100. David Weprin, chair of the Finance Committee, told Page the Council estimated it could mean losing 1,200 jobs in the retail sector. Read More
An awkward moment just now at the City Council budget hearing with Mark Page, who always seems to tangle with council members during these hearings.
Letitia James: Mr. Page, how was your Mother’s Day? And how is your mother?
Mark Page: You know, my mother has been dead and buried for 10 years, and if Read More
An awkward moment just now at the City Council budget hearing with Mark Page, who always seems to tangle with council members during these hearings. Letitia James: Mr. Page, how was your Mother’s Day? And how is your mother? Mark Page: You know, my mother has been dead and buried for 10 years, and if Read More
Testifying at a City Council hearing about Michael Bloomberg’s executive budget, city budget director Mark Page was just asked about the proposal to lift the sales-tax exemption that excludes clothing purchases under $100.
David Weprin, chair of the Finance Committee, told Page the Council estimated it could mean losing 1,200 jobs in the Read More
Some questions to the city's budget director are well informed and intelligent. Others are asked as if they are.
Throughout these hours-long appearances on the Read More
Despite some evidence suggesting that Michael Bloomberg doesn’t have the authority to stop the $400 property-tax rebate checks from going out, the mayor told reporters this afternoon that the issue is fiscal, not legal. Speaking at a press conference in Brooklyn, Bloomberg said, “Obviously we aren’t going to send out checks when we Read More
The head of the Citizens Budget Commission, Carol Kellerman, draws a comparison between Michael Bloomberg's use of $2 billion set aside to pay for future health-care costs and draining a trust fund.
“He’s using it in the short term," she said of the fund, which is officially referred to as the budget stabilization account. "And Read More
Mark Page, the dry but not humorless city budget director, has been testifying for two and a half hours in the City Council chambers, mostly defending the mayor’s plan to rescind the $400 rebates and assuring one skeptical councilman that “your premise, that the world ends June 30, 2009, I don’t think is realistic,” and Read More
Following up on his report issued yesterday, the Read More
Here’s Mark Page trying to respond to Eric Gioia’s agressive inquiries about the budget at City Hall today.
Robert Jackson didn't approve of fellow Councilman Eric Gioia’s line of questioning at a hearing on the Council's phony-appropriations scandal this afternoon.“I think it was political grandstanding on the part of Eric Gioia and his run for public advocate. But, quite frankly, I don’t know if he received any brownie points in that.”
Councilman Eric Gioia grilled the city’s budget director about the slush fund scandal during a heated Council hearing in City Hall just now.
Gioia asked, pointedly, whose job is to make sure there are no phony organizations in the city budget and what guarantees exist to ensure there are no fake groups in this year’s budget.The Read More
State Budget Director Laura Anglin is pushing back against what she calls the “inaccurate and higly misleading” comments made this morning by City Budget Director Mark Page, who told the City Council that the state is shortchanging the city.In a public statement released today, Anglin argues that the city is blaming the state Read More
Here’s more of Mark Page’s testimony to the City Council Finance Committee, which started this morning and is still going on.“The state would have us believe that any increases in state Medicaid spending are an increase in local aid," Page says. "They are not. They’re an increase in the state’s cost for maintaining a Read More
