North Country loses its biggest industry: local government
Two big political events this summer bring home the magnitude of the economic change now hurtling at the North Country.
The first of those changes was the debt-ceiling battle in Washington DC. If nothing else, the final “austerity” deal made it abundantly clear that the Federal government won’t be offering any more stimulus money any time soon.
That means no more checks written to prop up state and local governments and the services they provide.
The second landmark was Governor Andrew Cuomo’s signing into law the 2% property tax cap, a measure specifically designed to stifle budget growth in counties, towns, and school districts.
Even before those events, the North Country was already part of a massive wave of government downsizing that has swept the US.
Local government employment across the country peaked in 2008. Since then, nearly half a million local government workers have lost their jobs.
To put that in context, that’s nearly the equivalent of all lay-offs in the automotive industry since the 1980s. And in local government, the blood-letting happened in just a few years, not a few decades.
And the pain continues. In June, another 18,000 local government workers got their pink slips nationwide. Those numbers, by the way, don’t include public school layoffs.
Because rural America relies disproportionately on government jobs to drive small town economies, the cuts have hit places like the North Country particularly hard. And we don’t appear to be anywhere near the bottom.
Despite a couple of years of belt tighthening, Essex County currently faces a $7 million shortfall. St. Lawrence County’s deficit stands at $13 million.
With the tax cap in place, more deep and painful job cuts are all but certain.
So far, the reductions have happened (mostly) in dribs and drabs. A few teachers let go here. A DPW position left unfilled there. But these tend to be the best paying jobs in our communities and it all adds up.
It doesn’t help that this is a time when state and Federal officials are also curtailing the money that they ship our way. Subsidies for rural airports, for farms, and for hospitals are all on the line, in Washington and Albany.
Taken together, it may be time to start thinking about this moment in our region’s history as a similar event to the loss of the timber industry, or the rapid decline of the manufacturing sector.
As government steps back as the prime mover of the North Country’s economy, what’s next? And which communities — Elizabethtown? Malone? — are most vulnerable?
I’d also like to see better long-term plans from local government leaders that outline what their long-term structures will look like.
I know a lot of county executives and town supervisors are still in crisis-mode, trying to keep their heads above water. But we now know that this isn’t a temporary crisis. It’s the new reality.
We need to know what the landscape is likely to look like when the shake-up is over. How many jobs will remain? What services will citizens still be able to rely on? When the dust settles, what will the new ‘normal’ look like?
As always, your thoughts welcome.
I was kidding when I said a member of Congress.
So where was all the in depth coverage on just what the property tax would mean? In the local papers( all owned by one company) there was very little, mainly he said she said nonsense. The only real discussion on this was when Jeff Cole interviewed Ken Blankenbush and Addie Russel on the local PBS station. It was as if no real people or job losses were involved and the media was selling all of it as a magic bullet.
There are no investment bankers and very few specialist doctors or lawyers who work directly for the government so comparisons between white collar private employees and public employees is very hard.
When we can compare an exact same job, say a mechanic or a social worker or a teacher or a counselor, the public employees all make substantially more both in salary and benefits. This is easily verifiable particularly in the North Country.
But so what? Money is money and we gain nothing by paying the public sector employees less. If we reduce wages in the North Country for public sector employees our taxes would not go down and private sector employees would not get paid more, all that would happen is that the North country would be even more poor.
We need to get real, we don’t pay for our public sector, we get a net inflow of money from the rest of the state and the federal government money. It will not help us to reduce that money.