The Chautauqua County Legislature approved the 2024 budget by a 15-4 vote. Photo by Gregory Bacon

MAYVILLE – Chautauqua County Executive PJ Wendel said he was pleased Wednesday night after the legislature approved the budget for 2024 with “the lowest tax rate” in more than 40 years.

But unlike other budgets that he proposed, this one did not have any Democratic support.

During the county legislature meeting, lawmakers voted 15-4 for the 2024 budget. The $294.1 million spending plan has a tax rate of $6.91 per $1,000 assessed valuation. That is 89 cents lower than the current year’s rate of $7.80.

But even with the lower rate, the spending plan has a tax levy of $71,528,027, up from this year’s levy of $69,681,835. The levy is the amount collected by taxes.

Wendel submitted his budget for review at the September county legislature meeting. County lawmakers spent the past month reviewing it and making a number of modifications.

According to the resolution, there were increases in Medicaid, Unified court costs, Mental Hygiene Law, as well as employee benefits and retirement costs.

Because of this, the legislature cut Wendel’s planned $1 million lake maintenance fund to $500,000.

Before the budget review, the four Democratic legislators called on their fellow lawmakers to eliminate the newly created public relations post and use another $1 million in its reserve funds to lower property taxes further.

On Wednesday, the Democratic caucus in the legislature again proposed the same changes to the budget. Both proposals were voted on individually and both were defeated by the Republicans.

“The Democrats, the four of us, were against hiring the media information officer, that is paid for completely by taxpayer money, because we didn’t think that a PR position was necessary,” said Legislator Susan Parker, D-Fredonia.

In her vote calling for the elimination of the media information officer, Parker was joined by fellow Democrats Bob Bankoski of Dunkirk, Billy Torres of Jamestown, and Tom Nelson of Jamestown. No Republicans agreed with the proposal and the vote to remove the position from the budget failed with a 4-15 vote.

The Democrats also attempted to use $1 million of reserves to go to further property tax relief. The county has $37 million in its reserves, around 13.3% of the county budget.

“I think I speak for all of the Democratic legislators who feel that this unassigned fund balance is too large,” Nelson said. “We think we should give that back in the form of a tax reduction to our taxpayers and reduce the tax levy.”

Officials have said in the past that their own policy calls for between 5 and 15% in reserves. Parker said if $1 million was applied to further property tax relief, there would still be 11% in reserves.

Legislator Terry Niebel, R-Sheridan, said he was concerned that the county may need to lean on those reserves in the future. “This year in 2023, we’re already using $4.6 million from the fund balance. Because we don’t know what changes or what increase in costs may be coming down from the state, I don’t think we can adjust the fund balance anymore,” he said.

The resolution to use an additional $1 million of fund balance to further reduce the levy was rejected by the same 4-15 vote.

When the time came to approve the overall budget, it passed by a 15-4 vote, again with Parker, Bankoski, Nelson and Torres voting against it.

This is the first time the Democratic caucus has voted against the budget since Wendel has been county executive.

Both the 2022 and 2023 budgets were unanimously approved. For the 2021 budget, Wendel called for a cut the property tax rate by 5 cents. Instead, the legislature increased the budget by 5 cents. Because of that increase, Niebel was the sole legislator who voted against it.

After Wednesday night’s vote, Legislature Chairman Pierre Chagnon, R-Ellery, said he was pleased with the result. “We were presented with what looked like a pretty good tentative budget but then going through the review process, where the committees review department by department, line by line, it came to light that we had additional issues that needed to be dealt with. I think that the committees did a fine job in proposing recommendations to bring the budget back in line, with the tax rate reduction that was proposed in the budget, keeping the budget under the tax cap and dealing with the additional expenses that did come to light,” he said.

Wendel said he was pleased as well. “We presented a good budget. We’re looking at a tax rate reduction of the lowest in the last 41 years. We’re going to move forward. We’re excited. Again, there’s a lot of unforeseen things, changes at the state level. I know our senator and assemblyman constantly fight for us but there’s still some things unknown and we’ll deal with those as they come to us,” he said.