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For the past few years, Democrats in the Chautauqua County Legislature have been calling for the county's reserves to be spent down to lower property taxes.
It appears they have an unlikely ally.
Legislator Fred Johnson, R-Westfield, who is a member of the Audit and Control Committee and describes himself as a fiscal conservative, stated at the recent committee meeting that he would no longer support resolutions that use money from the county's reserves to offset shortfalls. Instead, he said he wants other departments' budgets cut and only use the unappropriated fund balance for "true emergencies."
While the amount fluctuates because of investments and expenditures, the county's fund balance has been reported between $30 million and $35 million.
During the August committee meeting, Johnson said he was opposing a resolution that was going to use fund balance.
"The fund balance is a rainy day fund. It is not a slush fund. If we treat it like a slush fund, we are abusing our trust with the taxpayers," Johnson said. "My position is that $125,580 (needed), the county executive needs to find that someplace else in the budget."
The resolution still passed and will go to the full legislature for final approval.
At the end of the committee meeting, county Finance Director Kitty Lyons said she would like some guidance from the committee as a whole on how they want future resolutions when there's a shortfall in a department.
Lyons said in the past they used to use overruns in one department to cover another department's shortfalls but that policy changed. "The direction of the legislature was that the legislature wanted to see the individual departments … do what they could to balance within their own department and then otherwise the offset would be the use of fund balance," she said.
Johnson didn't appear to support that policy. "When one department is short, I think we really should - the executive and legislature together - say OK, where have we done our due diligence across the entire spectrum to make sure that we have overturned every stone, to make sure that we can cover that internally before we go 'Hey taxpayer, we're going to dip into your fund because we can't burn anymore furniture or whatnot,'" he said.
When County Executive PJ Wendel proposed the 2026 budget, he said he wanted $500,000 from the county reserves to create a "Government Efficiency Fund" that would support local municipalities in mergers, consolidations, dissolution, shared services and other similar opportunities to reduce government.
Johnson said if Wendel proposes something like that again using county reserves, he would vote against the budget.
Lyons said the Finance Department's focus has been to use the fund balance for one time expenses.
But Johnson questioned the size of the county's fund balance. "I can't imagine a situation where within a budget year we could pop by $15 million. So there's $15-20 million extra that we could return to the taxpayers," he said.
Lyons said most departments don't have large surpluses, so to cover shortfalls may mean a reduction of services. "In most cases, we would be looking at reducing a budget and saying 'you're going to plow less road this winter' so we can afford this other item. That's what the choices are likely going to be," she said.
During the discussion, Legislature Chairman Pierre Chagnon, R-Ellery, said this topic has been debated in the past.
He said the philosophy the legislature came to was that if a department didn't spend all of its budget the excess was returned to the fund balance. If a department needed assistance, the county turned to the fund balance to cover it. Those pluses and minuses would balance out.
Chagnon did admit that a department may try to spend all of its budget on other items if it felt they were under budget to avoid returning their unspent fund to the fund balance. He said that is worth discussing among legislators.
Legislator Dan Pavlock, R-Ellington, who is the chairman of the Audit and Control Committee, said he thinks Wendel should be part of the discussion before they go any further.
Johnson agreed. "We ought to have the county executive because implicit of what I'm suggesting is an extra work load for the county executive and you (the Finance Department)," he said, motioning toward Lyons.
Pavlock said he would see about having Wendel attend the September Audit and Control Committee meeting.