County Executive Dan McCoy’s 2016 budget will have no tax increase, the county will not borrow money and a projected increase in tax revenues will mean more money for residents.
McCoy released his 2016 Executive Budget on Wednesday, Sept. 2. Proposed is a $610 million spending plan, which is a $4 million increase from last year. Taxes will remain well under the tax cap for the third year in a row, out of four budgets proposed during his time in office.
The budget projects a tax revenue growth of 1.1 percent over 2015 estimates, which would provide an estimated $104 million to municipalities in the county. Last year the counties received $3.4 million.
“Other counties are projecting cautiously… but we’ve been growing here in the Capital District,” said McCoy. Last year’s tax revenues were much larger than the county expected, and municipalities have benefitted from this.
McCoy credited this proposed sales tax revenue growth in the county budget to growth at the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute in Albany and the county’s low unemployment rate, at 4.8 percent. More budget cuts came from the reduced cost of health insurance and staffing changes at the Albany County Nursing Home.
The budget includes the 50 percent subsidy McCoy cut from the nursing home budget by reducing hours and rearranging employee shifts. The Albany County Nursing Home’s deficit is now cut in half. This resulted in an estimated $5 million saved.
County legislatures and McCoy had clashed over McCoy’s proposal to privatize the nursing home when it was in financial straights, but since the plan was nixed, McCoy has since worked toward diminishing the deficit.
Also included in the plan was the $500,000 in funding planned for the Albany County Land Bank, and the first half of the $250,000 in funding to the Department of Aging for programs that help seniors afford home repairs. This aids seniors who choose to live in their homes afford to live there.
The county will also not pass down the $10.5 million it pays for residents to have reduced costs for community college to towns. Since the state law requiring partial sponsorship of community college courses was created in 1973, McCoy claimed the state has not paid their fair share of those costs. Instead, the needed funding is passed down to the counties to provide.
“If I were to pass down that $10.5 million (to towns), I probably wouldn’t have to raise taxes for the next ten years,” said McCoy. “But it would crush their budgets.”
During his predecessor’s time in office, McCoy said the county budget had overestimated tax revenues to disastrous results, forcing the county to borrow $15 million.
“Our reserves were at all time low. We had 15 bargaining units, 20 million state workers that hadn’t had a raise in six years and we had a nursing home that was losing a $1 million a month,” said McCoy of the challenges he faced when he first entered the office.
Now, reserves have doubled in the last three years and all state workers received a wage increase this year and “on top of all of this, I didn’t raise taxes, and that’s the most important thing,” said McCoy.
“There were a lot of tough decisions that had to be made when I first entered office,” he said. “Only through our work to stabilize our finances have we been able to reduce costs and stay within the tax cap.”
