Posted by Leonard Steinberg on March 4th, 2013

$ 506,000,000.00 per year wasted: I often  wonder why New York real estate taxes are so high? Do we really get that much in the way of services from our government? We all know the unions abuse the system religiously to pay some workers excessively with excessive benefits at the expense of taxpayers (clocking up extreme overtime hours in their last years of employment to maximize pensions, aside from a litany of other abuses, all legal of course). Is it inefficiencies throughout the system?

Now a report shows how much the city wastes of our hard earned tax dollars on frivolous lawsuits: New York City taxpayers shelled out over a half-billion dollars last year to people suing for everything from slip-and-falls to car accidents allegedly caused by city employees……the same employees that cost the city a rising fortune.

The $506 million the city paid to plaintiffs in Fiscal Year 2012 was down from $565.2 million in FY 2011 — the first time in a decade such legal payouts declined……but this figure does not include the cost of DEFENDING the thousands of frivolous cases filed each year: of those cases 70% are dismissed. With over 9,000 claims a year, city attorneys say they are fighting more cases in court rather than settling just to get rid of them. In many cases though, the city still reluctantly settles because going to trial costs taxpayers even more.

A New York Post review found some claimants are still collecting outrageous sums in questionable cases, from a well-manicured transit cop who collected nearly $1 million for cutting her hand on a swivel chair, to a drunken cyclist who reaped $3 million after straying onto an unlit dirt path in a city park.

The juries who award these outrageous settlments are often those who don’t pay taxes at all. Yet we, the taxpayers have to pay for this nonsense…..and the sleazy lawyers who file the lawsuits get richer at our expense.  So where is the outrage?