In all the rhetoric that gets tossed around about budget cutting and government waste, some of the most misleading stuff involves unfunded mandates.<\/p>\n
It’s true that unfunded mandates are a disaster. They work like this: The state of New York demands that local governments, school districts, and other public entities provide a certain service.<\/p>\n
At first, Albany promises to bear the cost, or at least pick up part of the tab. But over time, the share of cash that comes from the legislature slows to a trickle, or ceases altogether.<\/p>\n
That leaves towns and counties burdened with big obligations and nowhere to go for the money except local property taxes.<\/p>\n
Some of those mandates are silly, or excessive, or inappropriate for our rural area. Is reform needed? Absolutely.<\/p>\n
But there’s another side of this coin, one that politicians don’t like to talk about.<\/p>\n
Most of those unfunded mandates translate into high-paying jobs (at least by North Country standards) and important services.<\/p>\n
High quality special education for kids? That’s an unfunded mandate. Mental health services for our neighbors. Same thing.<\/p>\n
Here’s where reformers are right: Albany needs to give local communities more power and discretion to decide which of these services are essential, especially if locals are paying the costs.<\/p>\n
But we can’t fool ourselves. If we cut these programs, we’ll be wiping out paychecks, and making life harder for some of our most vulnerable citizens.<\/p>\n
Tough choices lie ahead. Albany has shown that it’s not very good at making them. Can counties, towns and school districts do better?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In all the rhetoric that gets tossed around about budget cutting and government waste, some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}