Municipal officials must learn to share, panel says

Now is the opportune time for local governments to reduce spending and curb property taxes that are the highest in the nation through shared services and consolidations, municipal officials from Westchester County and the Hudson Valley region were told last week at a federal stimulus package conference hosted by Pace University Law School in White Plains.

To push that streamlining at the local government level, New York state officials are using both carrot and stick, said Lester D. Steinman, director of the Edwin G. Michaelian Municipal Law Resource Center at Pace, who led a “Stimuli for Savings” panel discussion on ways and resources for municipal officials to reduce costs and operate more effectively. One such resource is Pace”™s municipal law resource center, which Steinman said has served 44 local governments with legal research and consulting. “For the municipal attorney, shared legal services can be a godsend,” he said.

In Albany, the carrot is offered by the state Department of State with its four-year-old shared services grant program for local governments. Secretary of State Lorraine Cortés-Vázquez in her 2008 program progress report said the state over the past two years invested $23.3 million in 139 local government shared services projects that are projected to reap $245 million in savings locally. That amounts to an average cost savings of $8.24 for every grant dollar invested, she said.

Panelist Kyle Wilbert, municipal management consultant in the State Department”™s local government efficiency grant program, said his office has had more than 100 applications for funding for shared-services initiatives from the five-county Hudson Valley region.

Steinman said state lawmakers took “the stick approach” with local governments when they recently adopted state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo”™s bill on local government consolidation and dissolution. The new law makes it easier for citizens to petition for a public vote on whether their local governments should be merged or dissolved and also simplifies that process for local governing bodies.

Panelist Alfred DelBello, a leading advocate for streamlining local government as chairman of the Westchester County Association and member of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer”™s Commission on Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness, told local officials the Cuomo bill “is not going to be the sole solution but it is a major initiative” to cut into entrenched roadblocks to consolidated services.

DelBello said the time is right to make changes in local government operations for which few elected officials have been “willing to lead the pack.” “The public is really, really uptight about taxes and they realize something has to be done,” he said.

Lee Kyriacou, executive director of the state Office of Real Property Services and a former Beacon city councilman, said local property taxes in New York are 78 percent higher than the national average. Westchester households pay the highest property taxes in dollar amount of all the counties in the U.S., while the 10 worst property tax rates in the nation, when figured as a percentage of property value, are found in upstate New York counties, he said.

Kyriacou and DelBello said regional Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) offices could take over non-instructional functions for local school districts, including back-office operations, collective bargaining and maintenance, to realize savings that reduce the local property tax burden. New York has the highest per capita educational spending in the nation, at $19,000 per pupil, Kyriacou said, and school district expenses in the state continue to grow at a rate of 6 percent to 7 percent annually.

Applying the BOCES model more broadly, existing county governments could serve as regional suppliers of equipment and other services for towns and villages, DelBello said.

“It”™s all part of a movement of bringing us into the 21st century,” he said.