The trickle of local governments in the North Country contemplating an override of the 2 percent property tax cap has exploded into an Irene-scale flood.<\/p>\n
Essex, Franklin and St. Lawrence Counties are all moving toward an override.\u00a0 Massena has already voted to pull the plug.<\/p>\n
The cap was one of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s signature accomplishments and is still viewed with favor by most New Yorkers.<\/p>\n
But local government leaders saddled with paying for big ticket items that the state requires say they just don’t have a choice.<\/p>\n
Pension costs are rising.\u00a0 So are Medicaid costs.<\/p>\n
Facing his own budget pressures, and constrained by his promise not to raise income taxes, the governor has resisted absorbing any more of those expenses onto his own balance sheet.<\/p>\n
(He recently flat-out rejected the notion of the state taking over the business of paying for big-ticket Medicaid programs.)<\/p>\n
Complicating things further is the fact that the tax cap ran smack into a wave of natural disasters, including Irene, as well as a lingering downturn in the economy.<\/p>\n
Those are real-world events — not examples of profligate spending — and they’ve squeezed many towns, counties, and school districts.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, mandate reform in Albany seems to have stalled.\u00a0 Talk of moving forward with any kind of serious scale-back in the demands placed on local governments and school districts has faded to a mutter.<\/p>\n
But a different kind of mutter is growing louder.<\/p>\n
The strategy of passing a tax cap first, without enacting significant mandate reform, is the target of growing ire from people across the political spectrum.<\/p>\n
Massena councilman John Macaulay told NCPR that his city didn’t have a choice.<\/span><\/p>\n “Most of us on the board feel the state didn\u2019t think clearly through this. You can put a cap in place and if you don\u2019t change the mandated things you have to pay all you\u2019ve done is put all the political pressure on the local governments and taken it off yourself at the state level.” <\/span><\/p>\n It’s not my place to express an opinion about this, but I do think it’s time for Governor Cuomo to speak at length to these questions:<\/p>\n Was a 2% property tax cap really a workable policy, given the demands placed on local governments by state officials?\u00a0 What will it mean if dozens or hundreds of local governments simply override the rule?<\/p>\n And if higher taxes aren’t the answer, what services (that’s what mandates boil down to:\u00a0 government services) should we begin cutting?<\/p>\n This looked initially like a huge win for the governor.\u00a0 But if he’s not careful, it could begin to look more like a job left half unfinished.<\/p>\n So what do you think?\u00a0 Are local governments moving too fast to hike taxes, or has the state put them in an untenable position?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The trickle of local governments in the North Country contemplating an override of the 2 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[10,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4949"}],"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=4949"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4950,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4949\/revisions\/4950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}