As Martha Ellen reports, local officials are talking about a major rethink of what the county can and can’t do for its citizens.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re at the point where we may cut out whole departments because we have nowhere else to cut,\u201d County Administrator Karen M. St. Hilaire said. \u201cLong-term, county government has to make some real structural changes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. St. Hilaire has identified more than $6 million in potential cuts, including the possible elimination of the youth department. That could depend on whether the county must have a youth department to funnel state funds through for community programs.<\/p>\n
In the following year, the county will also look at cutting mental health clinics, which cost the county $600,000, chemical dependency services, which cost $750,000, home health care, which is down 3,000 visits so far this year, and the solid waste department.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As we’ve seen in the Horace Nye debate, these questions all have human faces, and often the people affected are the most vulnerable in our communities.<\/p>\n
Making sure kids have plenty of activities, providing safe and healthy housing for the elderly poor, and helping people with mental health and drug addiction — those are all good things, right?<\/p>\n
But these services may now be unaffordable, as Albany and Washington begin to cut and the property tax cap takes hold.<\/p>\n
So what do you think?\u00a0 Is this the “austerity” you were expecting?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The last couple of days, we’ve been talking about Essex County’s struggles with a $7 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4560"}],"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=4560"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4561,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4560\/revisions\/4561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}