Chris Collins wants to keep next year’s Erie County Legislature out of his way, even a Legislature populated by some of the candidates he’s running for office.

The county executive’s proposed budget for 2010 contains the customary resolutions that let the government turn its financial wheels throughout the year.

But many of those resolutions have been changed to let Collins and his staff adjust, tinker and trim spending in midyear without the Legislature’s approval.

Clauses have been stripped of the requirement that Collins must seek Legislature permission to:

• Raise the pay for select employees.

• Renew contracts with Social Services Department contractors.

• Accept or adjust grants from outside donors.

• Decrease the appropriation to cultural or public benefit agencies.

• Draw contracts to move inmates to other county jails to relieve crowding.

• Reduce aid to the Buffalo Niagara Convention & Visitors Bureau in midyear —which would have been a bigger deal in past months when Collins was pushing to replace its president.

County Comptroller Mark C. Poloncarz, whose staff found the changes in its annual review of the county executive’s budget proposal, said the resolutions have been designed to “avert legislative oversight.”

Previous county executives also have engaged in this type of budget maneuver.

The comptroller’s office, however, says Collins brought it to a new level by even shuffling the order of the more than five dozen budget resolutions to make them more difficult to compare with past versions.

“The budget resolutions are very important in ensuring checks and balances between the branches of county government,” Poloncarz said.

“Our office believes that many of these resolutions should be replaced by prior ones that ensure that all branches of government have a say in the running of Erie County, not just the executive.”

They were completed and arranged by Collins’ budget director, Gregory G. Gach.

“I have been doing budgets since the ’80s,” Gach said Wednesday. “Every year, the county executive writes the resolutions the way he wants them to read. And every year, the Legislature rewords them to put themselves in the middle of the process.”

Gach said he arranged the resolutions to group them according to the departments they affect, not to confuse people. “This is what the county executive would like,” he said. “And if the Legislature wants to change it, they can.”

The Legislature has indeed changed them in past years. And you see the results as county executives return to the Legislature in midyear with myriad requests: raises for workers; to accept grant money; to move money between departments or even within the budget lines of departments. It prolongs the bureaucracy, as Gach says, but it also gives lawmakers another glimpse at whether departments are spending too much and how the executive has shifted spending.

One former lawmaker says the dynamic goes back to the county’s earliest executives, Edward A. Rath and B. John Tutuska. “I think the Legislature has learned that in times of strife, it does not pay to give more power to the county executive, because it limits their oversight,” said Gregory B. Olma, a legislator from 1993 to 2001. “Otherwise, you can’t ask questions about the appropriateness of budget transfers until they have been done, and then it is a lot harder.”

Collins has no love for the Legislature and has found that many of its members meddle in decisions that are the province of a county executive.

Last year’s budget battle spawned another court fight between the Legislature and the executive about their authority. This year, Collins says, he wants no such fireworks.

This also is an election year for legislators, and the Republican county executive is supporting challengers to certain incumbent Democrats who he believes obstruct his agenda.

In reviewing Collins’ budget proposal, Poloncarz said the 2010 plan appears to balance, with $33 million in federal economic- stimulus money delivered to counties that contribute to their Medicaid programs.

But as the state-appointed control board has already done, Poloncarz found problems with Collins’ four-year financial plan, the document that shows how Erie County can balance its budgets through 2013. With the stimulus money expected to end next year, the county will see new financial problems the following year, Poloncarz said.

“The county’s 2011 fiscal year and budget will present county leaders with the most significant fiscal challenge since the 2005 red/green budget crisis,” he said, “and taxpayers and county employees will feel the effects.”

Gach responded, “The four-year plan is exactly what it is — a plan. It shows problems.”

Copyright 2009, The Buffalo News