Which Road?

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. "Which road do I take?" she asked. "Where do you want to go?" was his response. "I don't know," Alice answered. "Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."

— Lewis Carroll

Just a reminder that we're still waiting for the final Strategic Plan report from the Lebarge Group. Last fall, lots of folks from all over the County got together to talk about the County's future.

This can be an important intermediate step toward a Comprehensive Plan for the County, which would result in it mattering which road we take.

Good News About Cheaper Electricity

Otsego County* buys its electricity from MEGA (Municipal Electricity and GasAlliance). So do four towns, three villages and four school districts in Otsego County, as well as the City of Oneonta. MEGA combines the energy needs of large collections of municipal entities, and shops for the most economical energy available in a vast and complex market. MEGA has customers in all but eight upstate counties.

The NY Public Service Commission (PSC) will announce, in the next few months, whether it will approve Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) for New York communities. If a community (municipality) agrees to participate, individual households in that municipality can establish an aggregation, and get the same or similar benefits as municipalities themselves get from an aggregator like MEGA. Individual households must opt out (a relatively simple process) if they're not interested.

The energy market is evolving and five or ten years from now it will look very different. However, CCA is a good option for the next few years, with, it seems, few if any downsides.

* - meaning County buildings and facilities.

Sluggish Recovery Upstate

If you're reading this blog, chances are that you'd be interested in NYS's Comptroller, Thomas DiNapoi's, Annual Report on Local Governments. If not, here's the summary: while the state and downstate municipalities are doing better, upstate counties face a continuing set of obstacles to real recovery and growth. From the Executive Summary:

• The tax freeze and the property tax relief credit have added pressure on local governments to stay under the property tax levy limit.
• In many communities, foreclosures cases, shown to cause reductions in property values and erosion of the tax base, continue to be filed at levels considerably above those seen before the recession.
• Sale tax collection growth in 2015 has been below 2 percent across the State excepting New York City.
• Most on-going State general aid funds to municipalities have been held flat over the last few years.

Local government expenditures overall have remained largely flat since the recession, increasing at a 0.9 percent annual average rate from 2010 through 2014. However:

• Fixed costs have continued to grow, especially those related to employee benefits, with benefits increasing at a 6.3 percent annual average rate over the last four years.
• To balance their budgets, local governments have had to hold the line or reduce funding for services such as public safety, health services, economic development and roads.

Sales tax, revenue in general, and percentage increase in the tax levy have all been going down. Counties statewide depend on sales tax for about one third of total revenue, and the reduction in the price of gas has had a big impact on that. Otsego County's tax cap has been substantially below 2% for the last few years – and costs continue to rise. This year's tax levy hike won't even pay for the raises negotiated for CSEA county workers.

So we're actually doing pretty well, keeping major systems going, given that we're really cut to the bone. But the time will soon come for an adjustment: raises for upper level County staff (they've had one in eight years) and beefing up departments that have been gutted to keep tax hikes down.

Returning to Blogging

After an election campaign that got me out to see most of you this fall, and a late autumn and winter that was, to say the least, eventful, novel and exciting (and which involved a whole lot of travel), I'm back here at the blog. We've got a new Board – 7 of the fourteen of us are new January 1 – and a lot to do in a year in which there don't seem to be major difficulties or issues that might divert us for long periods of time. So it may be time to start thinking of some long-term planning.

Some directions I'd like to see us take:

• Comprehensive Plan: We need to know where we're going if we're going to get there. If we don't we'll just drift. We completed a Strategic Plan at the end of last year, and when the final report is available I'll make it available. I see this as a start – a quick process that identified some priorities.
• County Manager: This is one of the priorities which came up during the Strategic Plan process. More and more of us on the Board are thinking more seriously about it. Over five hundred employees in over 25 departments, and no CEO. I feel confident that we'll see some progress here this year. It's not going to happen quickly, partly because it will be a complex process, and partly because we really need to have a consensus for a County Manager without a stubborn opposition that can sabotage the process.
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: This task force operated under the supervision of the SWEC (Solid Waste and Environmental Concerns) Committee last year, and came up with a list of recommendations for SWEC and the County Board to pursue. This included further work on recycling textiles; thin plastic film (think plastic grocery bags); expanded polystyrene (EPS), otherwise known as styrofoam, and mattresses. We also talked about establishing an Otsego Green certification, which a business can earn by following a set of guidelines regarding recycling, reducing waste (for instance, not providing plastic garbage bags), reducing carbon footprint, etc.
• Fair Pay for Employees: The management/confidential (all non-union) County workers have had one raise in eight years, and as time goes on, the problems that this causes mount up: turnover of essential employees; unwillingness of staff to seek promotion; some staff managing union staff who make more than they do; not to mention the frustration and mistrust it creates between the Board and our department heads. This has to be fixed.

This year, I'm still on the Human Services Committee (which I chair again), the Health and Education Committee, and the Performance Review and Goal Setting Committee. I'm also on SWEC, which is a great thing. Let me know if you have any questions, concerns or ideas in any of these areas.