Proposed budget ups tax levy

Westchester County Executive Andrew J. Spano told a Yonkers Chamber of Commerce breakfast audience last week that a $24.4 million tax levy increase in the county”™s proposed 2008 county budget is due to state-mandated spending items “that we didn”™t expect.”

The bulk of those added costs, $18 million, comes from an increase in child welfare services in the county Department of Social Services. Spano said the county in 2006 was required to investigate 1,000 more reported incidents of child neglect or abuse.

The county executive”™s proposed 2008 budget of nearly $1.78 billion is up nearly $75.5 million from this year. In a slumping economy, a projected 1.6 percent increase in net sales tax revenues, estimated by county officials at $371 million, will not keep pace with the added costs of existing county programs, county officials noted when Spano”™s spending proposal was released last month.

The county”™s jail system is expected to cost an additional $9 million next year, due primarily to increases in salaries and overtime, much of which are tied to state-mandated staffing requirements, county officials said.

“It”™s over $200 a day to keep a guy in jail, $60,000 a year,” Spano told his chamber audience at the Leake and Watts children”™s services complex on the southwest Yonkers waterfront. At that price, “I could send this guy to Harvard,” SpanoÂ quipped. “In fact, I suggested that to Harvard. They said, absolutely not.”

Spano said Westchester”™s county jail inmates have the highest passing rate on the high school general equivalency exam among prisons in the state. And the county has launched follow-up programs for ex-inmates in targeted crime-prone neighborhoods, including one in Yonkers, to reduce recidivism. “All this costs money,” Spano said. “You spend it now or you spend it 10 times later.”

Spano said the county is “the overall encompassing agency that tries to maintain the quality of life in Westchester County. Nobody comes here because it’s cheap. The quality of life has to be maintained for everybody ”“ and that”™s not easy, because we have the high end of the scale and the low end of the scale.”