What to know how your taxes compare to your neighbors. Here’s a new Web site you’ll want to check out: http://www.seethroughny.net and click on benchmarks.

From the Associated Press:

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Why does it cost $1,500 more per resident to run the Finger Lakes city of Geneva than it does to run the central New York city of Utica?
Why is the tax burden for each person $600 more in the Adirondack’s Hamilton County than it is in Erie County?
Those are the kinds of questions you might have after looking at a new Web site that allows New Yorkers to compare spending, taxing and services at every village, town, city and county in the state.
The Benchmark New York site is a project of The Public Policy Institute of The Business Council of New York State and the Empire Center for New York State Policy, part of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is finding ways to allow executives to circumvent rules set by Congress.

More “here.”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/03/AR2009040303910.html

And here’s a CEO pay “database”:http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/ceou/index.cfm courtesy of the AFL-CIO.

A New York icon is going green.
The Empire State Building is being retrofitted to become more energy efficient.
The $20 million project is expected to save $4.4 million a year and reduce energy consumption by 40 percent.
The goal is to use the Empire State Building as a model.
Commercial and residential buildings account for more than 70 percent of New York City’s carbon footprint, Anthony E. Malkin, the president of Wien & Malkin, the building’s owners. The key to making substantial progress is reducing energy consumption in existing buildings.

The retrofitting is party of a $500 million makeover for the Empire State Building.
President Bill Clinton’s “Clinton Climate Initiative” helped to make the program possible.
“In this distressed economic climate, there is a tremendous opportunity for cities and building owners to retrofit existing buildings to save money and save energy,” Clinton said.

(AP Photo/Robert Mecea)

From Laura Haight, the senior environmental associate with NYPIRG:

“This momentous achievement is the first major overhaul of the state’s bottle deposit law since it was created in 1982, and caps a grueling nine-year campaign to expand and update the law.  The update expands New York’s bottle return law to include water bottles, which comprise nearly a quarter of all beverages sold in New York.  The law also requires beverage companies to return 80% of the unclaimed bottle and can deposits to the state…

“As a result of this law, we will have noticeably cleaner communities and far more recycling.  At the same time, the money from the public’s unclaimed nickels will go to work for us, not for Coke and Pepsi.”

Unfortunately it does not include iced tea, sports drinks and other beverages. So while the expansion is good news, those other bottles will still be littering the roadsides and washing up on the beaches.

Only water bottles, it turns out, a point I missed in my column today.

The version that the Legislature voted on expands the original law to include water—plain, flavored and nutritionally enhanced unless it contains sugar.

Environmentalists had originally pushed for iced teas, sports drinks and other non-carbonated beverages. This is a compromise.

It’s a start. Water bottles are everywhere. But those other bottles are out there too. Eventually, we’ll have to do something about them.

PHOTO: Carucha L. Meuse / The Journal News