Budget Time Again

The Budget Committee began chopping away at the $9.5 million gap this morning. The Committee is, essentially, the Administration Committee, but in this iteration, it is chaired by Donny Lindberg, the outgoing Representative from the southeastern corner of the county.

I would highly recommend attendance at these meetings for anyone who has the slightest interest in budgeting, County finances, or just the way groups of people operate in stressful situations. They are open meetings, which means the public is encouraged to attend. The next two will be at 9:15 on October 6 and October 19, in the second floor conference room of the County Office Building in Cooperstown.

The meeting began poorly, with Lindberg recommending a cut to our support of Cornell Cooperative Extension that, while miniscule in relation to the whole budget, would be fatal to a crucial agricultural education program, the Dairy and Field Crops team. Agriculture is Otsego County's top industry (tourism is second) and the team has shown some promise in the last year. Eliminating it as your very first act didn't make sense. Luckily, Lindberg couldn't get a second to his motion to make the cut he had suggested; he then moved cutting only half of that amount and, although he did get a second, he didn't get any further interest. The Committee felt it was better to follow the agenda and take the programs in order.

One of the biggest items for next year's budget is over $2 million to complete the multi-year, multi-million dollar tower project. I was wrong in my previous post: the total cost will be north of $20 million, not eight million. Grants have covered the great majority of the cost so far, but it turns out we did not get the final grant and will have to pay to finish the project (three towers and a lot of miscellaneous support expenses) from local funds. I found it interesting that noone at the table – including the new 911 Coordinator, Rob O'Brien, knew why we had not won the grant. Rob just started, so maybe that information is a little higher on the steep learning curve, but this is a big chunk of money to owe, on a project that must be completed, without knowing where we went wrong.

The Department of Social Services, which is overseen by my committee, Human Services, was also discussed. Their budget is enormous, and nearly all of it is spent to provide mandated services. The mandates – and the reimbursements for money spent – come from both NY State and the Federal government. I wrote about this a while ago. We need to find out how to be more engaged with the State agencies that bill, reimburse, and take back reimbursements in what seems to be a random manner, and carefully-thought-out movements toward accomplishing that are in the works.

I had to leave at noon (but made it further than Committee member Craig Gelbsman, who had to leave after about an hour), and they were beginning to talk about the completion of the roof project at the Meadows office building. I'll be there next Tuesday. More to come.

Campaign Time Again

 

It's campaign time again; the County Representative term is two years, so it's campaign time. I'll be running for reelection, and I hope to get to every house in the district before Election Day, as I have done before.

I particularly enjoy talking to people, usually on their front porches, about County issues and many other things that are on your minds. This is the essence of democracy, and as I've said before, I'm a big fan of democracy.

If you're interested in my re-election, you might want a stylish campaign sign (left) for your lawn. Let me know if you'd like one: I'll bring it to your house, install it, and then take it back the day after Election Day (unless you want to keep it...).

I look forward to meeting everyone again.

The Clock on the County Building

If you're like me, you've been looking at the clock on top of the County Building on Main Street, Oneonta, and wondering when it would be fixed so it will tell the right time. If you're as old as me, you've been wondering this for decades. Nothing like the most prominent landmark in the City leading us astray.

I got a letter from a constituent lately, about the clock, and so I had a reason to pursue the issue. I talked today with Doug Czerkies, head of the County Building Services Department; he's responsible for the building under the clock.

Doug had a surprise for me: although the County does, in fact, own the building – which used to be City Hall and the firehouse – the City still owns the clock! In fact, the clock has its own electric meter, billed to the City, and the City has an insurance policy just for the clock. That struck me as funny – I'm sure there is a reason that a clock needs an insurance policy (lightning strikes? Godzilla?) but that reason isn't perfectly obvious.

Doug says that the City is going to get to the clock sometime, and fix it so it tells the right time (on all four sides, I assume). There was a holdup on that project until recently, because no one could find the key to the clock tower. Apparently, Doug had one, and so soon we might get the time of day from the City clock on the County Building.

Just A Short Note About a County Manager

Otsego County is, by my reckoning, the second largest* County in New York State without an executive in charge of the day to day operations of all county departments and services. Most of the counties that are smaller than us have an executive, including six of the eight smallest.

We are constantly finding inefficiencies that are the result of very different departments working in ignorance regarding how the department down the hall does the same, or similar, thing. The Government Efficiency Committee is doing its best, but it meets only once or twice a month.

I know that the City of Oneonta has had two bad experiences with a Manager, but that has mostly been the results of factors unrelated to the Manager himself. We're actually lucky here – we've seen what the potholes and landmines are, and can plan for them.

We need someone to run what is equivalent to a medium-size corporation that is very diversified. More on this as time goes by.

* - Columbia county has, at last count, 835 more people than we do and is Manager-less as well.

UPDATE:  I had a faint memory of some change in a nearby county in this regard, so I looked it up.  Sure enough, in February of this year, Schoharie County (almost exactly half the size of Otsego) went to the County Administrator model.  So it is now true that seven of the eight smallest counties in the state have an executive of some sort.

$9.2 Million

You may have heard about the County's $9.2 million 2016 budget deficit, mentioned briefly by Treasurer Dan Crowell at the end of the last County Board meeting, and surfacing shortly thereafter as an article in the Star and then an editorial.

What was not flashed across the headlines was that Treasurer Crowell also said, when presenting the budget summary, was that we're at about the same place we've been in September of most budget years. There's a big gap and we have to close it, and close it we do.

Two items on his list concern me, though. First, revenue projections in the DSS budget will decrease by $1.2 million by next year. As you may know, I chair the Human Services Committee, which oversees DSS, and we've been struggling with this – and similar issues – for a while now.

The short version of this is that DSS's budget is almost entirely comprised of costs for mandated services and the reimbursements we receive from some of them. It would be nice if the State sent us a check in January for what we spent and claimed during the previous year (or some similar, naively simple scheme), but they don't. Checks from the State, and pass-through money from the Feds, show up at random times, and are often difficult or impossible to determine just what they are for. And then – often four or five years later – out of the blue, the State will “claw back” some of that money, for reasons which are not always clear, either, but generally have to do with their impression that we were overpaid.

We're making some personal appeals to NYS Comptroller Tom DiNapoli about this, on behalf of us and most other counties. This kind of thing has to stop, and the departments in Albany responsible for this funding stream must become more organized and timely, because $1.2 million makes a big difference in Otsego County.

Another $1.2 million item is the local cost of the new towers being built to create a much more comprehensive communications system for our emergency services personnel throughout the county. The project has been going on since before I was on the Board, and the total pricetag is over eight million dollars. We hear of progress almost monthly; right now, we're hoping to have it in place and working next year.

This project has been grant-funded. I don't remember hearing, in previous years, about a $1.2 million local share at the end of the project; we certainly haven't been talking about preparing for it financially over the long term. It's something we all need to learn much more about.

The Daily Star urges us “to be judicious in making whatever cuts necessary to balance the budget.” We always are, and we will be again, with our without the Star's urging. We'll have a balanced budget, that everyone is able to examine and comment on, by the end of December.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Did you know that both Hannaford and Price Chopper have to, by law, collect and recycle certain types of thin film consumer items right in their stores? Neither did I, until I started working with a new County task force.

I am a member of the 3R Task Force (reduce, reuse, recycle), a subcommittee of the Solid Waste/Environmental Concerns Committee. Actually, it's a task force I recommended we form, in order to reduce the solid waste sent to the landfill from Otsego County. Ed Lentz (D-New Lisbon) chairs it, and we met again last night in Hartwick.

There's a lot to learn in this arena. First of all, landfills: not infinite. It is essentially impossible to get a permit for a new major landfill in New York State, and, as they fill up, they close. This is another one of those lurking environmental disasters about which we're not quite clear right now, but which could provide a nasty and expensive surprise to our children or grandchildren.

Ironically, it's not in the solid waste industry's financial interest to reduce the tonnage that ends up in the landfill. They are paid by the ton, and reducing tonnage reduces revenue. That's true for the County, as well, as a result of our transfer station agreement with Cassella, but the County is not (at least from my viewpoint) in the business of making money from solid waste.

However, reducing tonnage is in everyone's interest, not only because we're running out of places to put it. A lot of the trash that ends up in landfills doesn't stay there, and does damage elsewhere – for instance, microbeads, the extremely tiny plastic beads found in many personal care products that find their way through septic filters and water treatmentplants, polluting waterways and concentrating in marine life, whichmistake them for food. Some states and counties have outlawed the sale of products containing microbeads, and some home care corporations have pledged to take them out of their products. Should we do this in Otsego County? More to come.

There's a company in western New York State that disassembles mattresses and recycles the components, where possible. If you think of the truckloads of mattresses that are thrown out just by the colleges and hotels in Otsego County each year, these mattresses are a significant addition to our landfills. There's a catch, of course – this company charges to take away the mattresses. Should we set up a tractor-trailer at the transfer station to store the mattresses? Charge the consumer? Pay for it from the County budget? Require Scholet and the other furniture stores to charge a fee for every mattress sold? We are making plans to pilot something like this next year.

Lots more. Fabrics are recyclable, but we don't generate enough volume out here in the country to justify the recyclers to add us to their route. Dunkin' Donuts still uses expanded polystyrene (styrofoam) cups for medium and large coffees. How do we get them to move to more recyclable products? How about an Otsego Green program, where retail businesses can earn a green certification that they 'display proudly'? We've all seen the mile or two sections of highway that are 'adopted' by an organization for litter pickup. How do we offer a mile or more of the Susquehanna riverbank for the same service?

As is often the case, more questions than answers. But we're working on answering the questions that come up, one by one. Any ideas?