Budget Scorecard: The High Cost of Village Life
Residents of incorporated villages in our region shoulder a heavy fiscal burden for the additional public services they receive, paying in many cases more than twice as much in local property taxes as their neighbors living outside of village lines.
While typical village services– such as police, road maintenance, street lighting, and trash collection– are more extensive and more expensive than what towns typically provide non-village taxpayers, village property owners are also saddled with paying for a portion of the surrounding town’s annual budget. On top of higher taxes, village residents pay costly user fees for the municipal water and sewage systems that most villages provide.
As we did last month for 27 rural towns in Columbia and northern Dutchess counties, we have drawn on 2004 budget data from the Office of the State Comptroller (OSC) to rank ten villages in the area in terms of their costs to taxpayers. Only one village in our sample— Millbrook in Dutchess County—stands out as an extraordinarily expensive municipality, while the Columbia County Village of Valatie appears to be an example of how to keep taxes low and manage efficient delivery of key public services.
Numeric rankings for the ten villages , as well as previous rankings on the 27 towns , are available in the “Budget Scorecard Database” on our Resources Page.
“Villages are expensive,” acknowledges Mayor Marc Molinaro of Tivoli Village near the Dutchess-Columbia county line. “But I haven’t got anyone in Tivoli who doesn’t want the services we provide.”
Included in Tivoli’s 2004 per capita property tax of $233– low by village standards and about in line with the average rural town– is a contract payment of $34,000 to the Dutchess County Sheriff’s department which, Mayor Molinaro noted, provides patrol coverage for about eight hours per day compared to only eight hours per week in the surrounding Town of Red Hook.
With the average property tax for village services running about $290 per person, or 27% more than the average per capita town tax bill, there may be lessons in fiscal prudence to be found in the Village of Valatie, where property tax charges in 2004 were only $104. Part of Valatie’s success in holding down property taxes is that, like all Columbia County municipalities, it receives a much larger share of county sales tax receipts than do its Dutchess neighbors. Even after combining sales and property tax receipts, however, Valatie’s performance stands out at $197 per capita versus the ten-village average of $368 and the town average of $334.
“We’ve been very successful in getting grants,” from state and federal sources for major capital improvements, explained Valatie Mayor Gary Strevell.
In addition, Mayor Strevell noted, Valatie has chosen to contract out its police, road and trash services rather than building up a costly micro-bureaucracy in the village hall.
On the other extreme of the ranking scale, Millbrook’s village government operations cost taxpayers 65% more than the ten-village average, or $598 per resident, based on 2004 data compiled by the OSC.
Millbrook Mayor Donald Briggs refused to comment on the OSC figures, choosing instead to hang up the phone on this columnist. Several calls to other village officials did not produce any explanation of Millbrook’s apparently excessive spending patterns.
We have not included in our village rankings the user fees residents pay to their village water and sewer systems, which typically add about $280 to the annual per capita costs.
On top of the fees and levies they pay for village services, village property owners are also taxed by the surrounding town for a portion of its annual budget, including charges for most town government salaries, recreation services, justice courts and some large-scale construction projects.
The combination of village and town property taxes, measured on a per capita basis, leaves village taxpayers footing bills that are substantially larger than those of their non-village neighbors. Combined 2004 per capita property taxes in the village of Kinderhook, for instance, were 150% greater than the levy paid by non-village residents of the surrounding Town of Kinderhook. Likewise, property owners in the incorporated Village of Red Hook paid 120% more than Town of Red Hook taxpayers living outside the village limits.
Do villagers receive adequate town services to justify their contribution to the town’s coffers?
“I’ve long contended that the village gives more to the town than it takes,” said Mayor Strevell of Valatie, which lies within the Town of Kinderhook.
Some officials have suggested that villages should be consolidated into the surrounding towns in order to provide comparable public services for less money. Others argue that maintaining village home rule, despite its high costs, is the best way to provide the desired level of service to residents.
“The dissolution of villages may actually drive taxes up, assuming the towns aren’t providing the same level of services as productively as we can,” said Tivoli Mayor Molinaro. “We have to be more efficient.”
Valatie Mayor Strevell, who is celebrating his village’s 150th anniversary, pointed to a history of home rule that may still justify the existence of small, incorporated villages.
“The reason Valatie started 150 years ago,” he said, “was that the residents were not getting the services they wanted from the town.”
Yet even the most frugal villages are struggling to cope with cost pressures from rising wage demands, aging water systems and population growth: Valatie’s property tax levy has nearly doubled since the year 2000.
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3 Responses to “Budget Scorecard: The High Cost of Village Life”
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There is a significant leap of faith when one attempts to compare per capita or per mile etc. expenses vs averages. Taxes don’t always equate to service rendered and also taxes in a village rarely paints the picture of services required compared to services offered.
Robert Macfarlane
REPLY:
No leap of faith intended. This exercize is aimed at highlighting villages which may be more or less productive at providing services to their residents. More detailed analysis is needed to verify the costs and benefits of services in each village. I hope to follow up these findings with a more thorough comparison of, for example, the level of service in a high-cost village like Milbrook with an apparently lower-cost village like Valatie.
What we get in the Village of Kinderhook for our escalating taxes is:
garbage pick up once a week;
a village recreation program for children;
and an opportunity to attend Village board, planning board and ZBA meetings to try and stop or mitigate some of the destructive ideas the Village has to face in terms of development. We often think we are not getting our money’s worth!
Alexandra and Jock Spivy
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