• • Support the Toll Payer Protection Act
• • End Public Service Commission’s hidden fees and surcharges on energy
• • Establish accountability for the role state agencies play in the Affordability Crisis

With the Thruway Authority scheduled to expand its cashless tolling program and the Public Service Commission pursuing Clean Energy projects through new energy surcharges, New York lawmakers must protect its citizens from overstepping bureaucrats.

New York State’s tolling authorities have granted themselves the authority to attach ridiculous fees to the Toll By Mail program, enforceable by suspending vehicle registrations, with collection practices that would make the worst debt collectors blush. What’s worse, these fees of up to $100, apply to every crossing—not every bill. If your Toll By Mail gets lost in the mail, or New York State has the wrong address on file (because the DMV inexcusably fails to link car registration addresses to driver’s license addresses), a monthly commute could cost you more than $2,000 in additional fees with no clear legal recourse.

The Public Service Commission is required under law to ensure the delivery of reliable, low-cost energy to New Yorkers. Yet, under the Clean Energy Standard the PSC has violated its mandate and allocated resources—and ratepayers’ money—toward the development of the most expensive, least reliable energy while ignoring infrastructure that will be necessary to supplement the gaps in a wind-and-solar energy portfolio.

• • Replace giveaways and incentives with a friendlier business tax climate
• • Repeal the Millionaire’s Tax
• • Prevent government expansion of Prevailing Wage into private construction

The Amazon deal betrayed the extreme cost of doing business in New York, with the Governor giving away $6 in taxpayer money for every $1 by Virginia to achieve the same goal. While we have one of the nation’s least burdensome corporate taxes, New York compounds taxes, regulations, mandates and unnecessary expenses disproportionately on small and independent businesses, discouraging new companies from starting and existing companies from growing.

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• • Oppose single-payer health care
• • Eliminate reductive New York State taxes on health care
• • End expensive coverage mandates on insurance plans

With a price tag of more than $139 billion and carve outs for public sector unions, a single-payer healthcare system is simply not affordable in New York state. If the state legislature is serious about making affordable health care available to all New Yorkers, it will eliminate more than $4 billion in taxes on our premiums and direct care costs, remove expensive coverage mandates on insurance plans, and adopt new federal marketplace standards to improve competition and prices for New Yorkers who buy their own policies.

• • Permanent Property Tax Cap must be paired with state mandate relief of local tax burden
• • Local spending continues to grow much faster than rate of inflation
• • Local Governments & Schools resort to one-shots, operating debt, fund balance and illegal fees

At each level of local government over the last four years (excluding New York City), spending has grown at a greater pace than during the four years immediately preceding the enactment of the property tax cap—at nearly double the rate of inflation. The solution to New York’s out-of-control spending is to control spending; tax relief will follow.

The property tax cap only restricts one form of local revenue; without mandate relief, local governments and school districts are forced to create new revenue streams, rely on one-shots and operating debt, raid their reserves, enact illegal fees to pay for general government operations, and ignore administrative laws. And because the property tax cap is tied to the rate of inflation, New York State is asking local government to master economic trends that most Wall Street brokers do not understand. Five-year financial planning is becoming more and more a fool’s errand.