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It’s easy for local governments to drive a hard bargain on pay and benefits during contract negotiations when everybody knows a government is struggling to keep its budget affordable for taxpayers.
Fiscal discipline for cities like Jamestown or Dunkirk is easy when you’re increasing taxes each year to simply keep the status quo.
It’s not as easy when you’re a local government sitting on a sizeable surplus. Fiscal discipline is difficult because everyone knows your financial cup runneth over.
In our opinion, county lawmakers didn’t show fiscal discipline when they approved cost-of-living-adjustments to salary ranges for county managers. Tying salary ranges to inflation creates an ever-escalating cost increase to the budget. On its own the decision doesn’t seem like much. But because employees know the county is flush with cash, there are more and more requests for sweeteners to retirement, wages and other perks. And the cumulative effect of saying yes to all of those requests can end up having a crushing impact on the county budget when the county’s savings account starts dwindling.
County officials like to talk about mandated costs. And yes, New York state does require the county to provide certain services that account for $113 million of the county's recently approved 2027 budget. But there are other contractually mandated costs that the county does control that are part of the $217 million in county spending not accounted for by state requirements. We're talking about salaries and benefits for county employees that the County Legislature has to approve when they come up for review. Those costs aren't mandated until the county's elected officials approve them, while other mandated costs often start as mundane requests, like changes to salary ranges, proposals to tie salary ranges to inflation or the recently tabled request to allow retiring county managers to receive paid health insurance coverage after retirement at the rate which matches that of the highest service-related calculation afforded within any county union collective bargaining unit agreement.
Employees see the arguments over how to spend the county's surplus. You can't blame county employees for asking for things they know the county can afford now in what is a best case scenario. But county lawmakers and administrators can't assume the best case scenario will last forever. That's the thinking that put Jamestown and Dunkirk in the positions they now find themselves. And until county lawmakers learn how to say no, or to bring a compromise that benefits both employees and the county, then the county's non-state mandated costs will continue to increase.