As the slowing U.S. economy curtails municipal tax revenues across the country, many Hudson Valley counties, including Columbia, Dutchess and Rensselaer, are also facing sharp increases in capital spending on roads and buildings.
The dual perils of declining sales taxes, which comprise 30-50% of a county’s tax revenues, and a large backlog of urgent capital projects will likely put a growing burden on property taxpayers, especially in more heavily indebted counties that cannot borrow much money to fill the fiscal gap.
Candidates sparring for local office in next week’s elections face a bewildering array of statistics they can use to tout their own financial achievements or criticize their opponents’ fiscal failures. Though the numbers are often confusing and occasionally misleading, there are legitimate methods of budget analysis that can be helpful in judging the financial performance of incumbent office holders.
As a case in point, we’ve focused on one contested race where finances are at the center of the campaign and where the stakes are high: the race for supervisor of Columbia County’s largest town, Kinderhook, where the four-term incumbent, Douglas McGivney, is running against Gary Strevell, who has served since 2003 as Mayor of Valatie, one of the incorporated villages within the town.
With local elections fast approaching, the time seems apt to highlight findings from our municipal budget research that may prompt voters to ask tough questions of incumbent office holders and may help candidates provide convincing answers.
We’ve compared data for 28 towns and ten villages in Columbia and northern Dutchess counties with the aim of identifying the best and worst municipalities in terms of their recent financial management, a crucial test for any elected official. The data, from the Office of the State Comptroller (OSC), provide preliminary answers to three basic fiscal questions: 1) How high are taxes in the town or village relative to its peer group; 2) How much have the municipality’s property taxes increased over the past three years; and 3) Are large future tax increases likely due to the town government’s failure to invest sufficiently in upgrading its highway department and road network, which typically account for two-thirds of town spending.
The results of our research, tabulated below, offer merely a rough sketch of fiscal performance, a handy reference guide for voters and candidates seeking to assess the strengths and weaknesses of current office holders.
Two country neighbors, the towns of Gallatin and Taghkanic in southern Columbia County, have a lot in common: rolling vistas of wooded, sparsely populated hills, abundant farms, and little commercial activity or road traffic to disturb the tranquil surroundings. But beneath their rustic setting, in the realm of budget discipline and financial health, the two adjacent towns are worlds apart.
Hillsdale Supervisor Art Baer’s letter to The Independent newspaper criticizing my last “Views From Gallatin” column takes aim at what he describes as my “superficial analysis and presentation of data” comparing tax rates and other fiscal measures of 28 towns in our region.
I would like to respond to each of his points, but first I would reiterate that the purpose of the budget columns and database is “to shed light on what drives our property taxes, and what we can do to control them” by comparing financial profiles of towns which may be facing very different fiscal challenges. As I wrote in the May 29 column for The Independent, the data, provided by the Office of the State Comptroller, “may not reflect the quality of services offered by different towns.”
Updated town budget data recently released by the Office of the State Comptroller confirms the findings we published in this column last year and identifies the same three towns as the region’s most fiscally challenged: Taghkanic, Hillsdale and, most worrisome, Greenport.
We have made several enhancements to our analysis of the OSC data, designed to better rank the 28 towns in Columbia and northern Dutchess counties on the quality of their fiscal management and the likelihood they will need large property tax increases in the near future.
Our latest study ranks the towns on five key measures: 1) property taxes per capita; 2) total taxes per capita (including county sales tax receipts); 3) general government expenses per capita, which cover most services other than road maintenance and special districts for water, sewer, trash collection, etc.; 4) highway department costs per road mile; and 5) highway capital investment from 2001-2005 compared to the average for the 28 towns.
A survey of county budgets, by far the largest source of local government taxes levied on New York residents, highlights a few counties for their fiscal discipline, singles out others with especially high taxes and invites more in-depth comparisons on spending for specific programs.
Overall, tax revenues in 22 counties located in and around the Hudson Valley grew by 40% from 1999 to 2004 to $680 per person, more than twice the level of town taxes, according to the latest data available from New York’s Office of the State Comptroller (OSC).
As in previous columns that compared budgets for dozens of towns and villages, the county rankings are a preliminary tool that may overlook sound financial or political reasons why one municipality spends more than its peers. The detailed county rankings are available in our "Budget Scorecard Database" under County Budget Scorecard .
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.
As a follow-up to our last column on town budgets, we've added a table to our "Budget Scorecard Database" that ranks 27 Hudson Valley towns by the amount of money invested over the 2000-2004 period per mile of road in the town.
Our aim is to point out which towns have spent substantially less than average on their road systems and to prompt town officials and citizens to follow up on our statistics with more thorough examination. The table, Town Highway Capital Spending , also highlights those towns which have invested substantially more money than average over the five-year period, another topic for concerned citizens to pursue.
Please read the initial column, Budget Scorecard: Where Does Your Town Rank? , that puts the statistics and their intent into context.
And please send us your comments!
In an ongoing effort to shed light on what drives our property taxes, and what we can do to control them, this column has begun to take a closer look at the annual budgets of the towns, villages, counties and school districts in our Hudson Valley region.
Working with data compiled by the New York Office of the State Comptroller (OSC), we are aiming to measure the fiscal performance of local governments and school districts, compare them to their peers, and identify key factors they may want to address in order to provide public services in more financially productive ways.
This first installment of the “Budget Scorecard” looks at 27 largely rural towns in northern Dutchess and Columbia counties and concludes that a few towns stand out for fiscal prudence-- notably Milan, Red Hook and Livingston—while the relatively poor showing of others-- including Greenport, Taghkanic and Hillsdale—requires further explanation.
