Suggestions lacking for KO’d county plan

Updated: 11/10/08 09:00 AM

By Matthew Spina
News Staff Reporter

The law that created Erie County’s state-appointed control board says that when the board rejects the county’s four-year financial plan, it “shall” formulate and adopt modifications “as necessary.”

But the control board since 2005 has rejected budgets and four-year plans without formulating and adopting anything, or at least telling county leaders specifically how to balance their spending.

This year, the control board did something unusual when it declared County Executive Chris Collins’ first budget proposal and his four-year plan out of balance. As part of their lawyer-vetted statement, the members said they need not recommend solutions if they think the Legislature and the county executive lack the political will to follow them, anyway.

The elected leaders who act as budget stewards — Collins, legislators and County Comptroller Mark C. Poloncarz — responded with a collective, “Huh?”

Poloncarz called it a derogation of the control board’s duties.

The Collins team issued a statement calling it “ironic that the control board questions the political will of elected officials when it has consistently lacked the will to meet its basic legal obligations.”

Legislature Chairwoman Lynn M. Marinelli, D-Town of Tonawanda, called the board’s logic circuitous.

“They are assuming there is no will,” she said. “But how can you make an assumption when you haven’t presented anything?”

County leaders suspect that the six men from the worlds of business, government and organized labor who make up the control board do not come up with modifications because they don’t want to advocate higher taxes. Nor do they want to surrender their rank as a “hard” control board, which they would have to give up if they agreed that the county’s budgets and four-year financial plan were balanced.

The control board chairman has a different explanation for why his members don’t show how to balance the four-year forecast.

“They are the managers of the county,” Chairman Robert M. Glaser said of the county executive and the Legislature. “They have to deal with those issues.”

Next year’s proposed budget is on the Legislature’s lap. As in most years, the lawmakers are hearing from the cultural and charitable groups that clamor for more aid.

Cornell Cooperative Extension stands to lose the $295,000 grant that helps it support 4-H programs. The Hamburg Natural History Society would go without about $40,000 for its Paleontological and Outdoor Education Center. The Soil and Water Conservation District would lose $170,000. Other groups are in a similar bind.

Can the Legislature restore their support and keep the tax-rate increase at 3.6 percent or less — when the control board says fundamental flaws undermine next year’s budget?

“Our oversight is to say, ‘You have a problem here; go deal with it,” ” said Glaser, managing director of the accounting firm Freed Maxick & Battaglia. “They can raise revenues or cut expenses. We can’t do their jobs for them.”

As a hard control board, the six volunteer appointees — seven when at full strength — can reject any contract worth at least $50,000 and can block the county from filling vacant jobs and from borrowing money.

They also can freeze wage increases and set spending limits, powers they have never exercised. And they continue to control millions of dollars from Albany that they can dispense for efficiency projects.

The control board also can, or “shall,” as the law says, “formulate and adopt its own modifications to the financial plan, as necessary.”

Marinelli says that by not doing so, the Fiscal Stability Authority ensures its existence as a hard control board, budgeted to consume $700,000 in county taxes next year. To force the issue, she sent Glaser a letter asking that his board “discharge its obligation.” County leaders could then take the steps that satisfy the control board and, in theory, return it to “advisory” status. But her letter won’t change the board’s stance.

“The control board has given them the map of our concerns with a resolution to do something about it,” Glaser said. “They ought to do that. That’s their job. We don’t have the power to make them do anything.”

The board’s analysis determined that Collins’ conservative sales-and property-tax estimates were not conservative enough considering the economy and that he had underestimated major expenses for salaries, benefits and the county’s deep obligations to Erie County Medical Center, among other things. The members also said they could not be certain the Legislature would raise fees by almost $600,000 or keep the sales-tax rate at 8.75 percent late next year, two assumptions on which a balanced budget for 2009 is based. But the board won’t specify how county officials should cut expenses, raise revenue, or both.

This spring, the Senate and the Assembly voted to strip the board of its power to block the county’s bond sales as long as the county had adequate credit. Gov. David A. Paterson later protected the control board by vetoing the restriction. Just recently, Paterson endorsed the board’s direction by elevating Glaser, the vice chairman, to chairman, succeeding the departing Anthony J. Baynes.

State Sen. William T. Stachowski, D-Lake View, was among several local lawmakers who voted for the bill curtailing the control board’s power. Now he’s in line to become Senate Finance Committee chairman.

“I would like to see them provide suggestions, as the law allows them to do,” Stachowski said of the control board last week. “. . . I would like to see them working together to try to move forward, for the good of the people and the county.”