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CAPITOL
Supporters of property tax cap anxiously await Spitzer speech
BY BOB CONNER Gazette Reporter

    If the best Gov. Eliot Spitzer can come up with today in his State of the State address is a commission to study whether to enact a property tax cap, then he just shouldn’t bother, according to Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco, R-Schenectady.
    “Unless Gov. Spitzer comes out in support of a property tax cap and actually commits himself to passing it,” Tedisco said in a news release, “then I think this session — and possibly his governorship — will be characterized as a failure.”
    There has been widespread media speculation this week that the governor will propose some kind of percentage cap on property tax increases, or at least a commission to study that and the reasons for the high rates of property tax paid by New Yorkers. The governor’s press office declined to confirm or deny the reports, as did the governor. But last August at Hofstra University on Long Island, Spitzer said he was open to the idea of a tax cap. He had opposed a cap in the 2006 election campaign, when it was supported by his Republican opponent, John Faso.
    “We were hearing rumors out of the governor’s office … that there will be a commission to study the feasibility of a cap and unfunded mandates,” said Carl Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers.
    His boss, NYSUT President Dick Iannuzzi, said, “In general, a property tax cap is not a good idea.” It would take decisions out of the hands of voters, he said, and could increase the disparity between rich and poor school districts.
    E.J. McMahon, director of the fi scally conservative Empire Center for New York State Policy, is an enthusiastic supporter of caps, and of a bill to enact them sponsored by Tedisco’s Republican conference. That bill (A-8775) was modeled after the cap in former Gov. George Pataki’s School Tax Relief (STAR) Program proposal, which was dropped in negotiations with the Legislature before STAR was passed.
    The bill would cap school tax increases at 4 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. Similar measures in Massachusetts and other states have held down property taxes to levels far below New York’s, McMahon said. New York’s high property taxes are widely seen as a key factor driving businesses and people out of upstate New York, and McMahon said school taxes make up most of the burden.
    While STAR does not control spending, and thus serves ultimately as a subsidy to school districts, McMahon said a tax cap would be a very significant reform, if enacted.
    But David Albert, spokesman for the state School Boards Association, said a tax cap “doesn’t address the root causes that are driving up school budgets.” The association might support a commission with a broader mandate to study tax issues, Albert said.
    If Spitzer does propose a tax cap, its prospects are uncertain in the Legislature. NYSUT, Iannuzzi said, would lobby against it, and it has a lot of influence with legislators. Dan Weiller, spokesman for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, DManhattan, declined to comment on the prospect of a tax cap.
    Scott Reif, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno, R-Brunswick, said the Senate is focused on its own proposals to reduce property taxes. But he told The Associated Press that the Senate could support a local property tax cap.
    McMahon said the Assembly did pass a one-house bill a dozen years ago that capped all property taxes, as it maneuvered for advantage against Pataki, who was proposing incometax cuts. Silver was speaker then, too, but his house has not returned to the issue, McMahon said.
    The AP reported that Spitzer wants the state to pay off the student loans of physicians who agree to serve rural and urban areas without enough doctors, an administration official said.
    Spitzer is also considering a $1 billion Upstate Revitalization Fund and other measures to renew downtowns and attract businesses. And he may seek to name the Triborough Bridge connecting Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the assassinated Democratic presidential candidate.
    The cost of the initiatives won’t be part of today’s State of the State speech, which is expected to include big ideas for creating hightech jobs and transforming the state’s economy through higher education. Spending details will come Jan. 22, when Spitzer proposes his 2008-09 budget to the Legislature, which should include how to deal with a $4.3 billion deficit.
    “We are facing choppy waters as we look out at the national landscape, economically,” Spitzer said Tuesday. “But we have enormous demands here in the state, enormous obligations to invest in education and health care and infrastructure. Jobs, jobs, jobs is what we are going to be focusing on.”
    The Senate’s Republican majority, which has clashed with the Democratic governor since June, has its own “Upstate Now” proposal. It would more broadly apply tax breaks and incentives to retain and attract employers. But despite some similarities with Spitzer’s proposal, the Senate plan didn’t become law last year.
    The program to ease a doctor shortage, if approved and funded by the Legislature, is aimed at relieving a shortage of medical care in the northern part of the state as well as inner cities, the administration official said on the condition of anonymity because the speech wasn’t yet finished.
    “Doctors Across New York” would provide grants to repay student loans and other unspecified inducements to reach a goal of providing a family doctor for every New York household, the official said.
    The program will also address the problem of medical students leaving college and training with loan debt of more than $100,000. The official had no estimate of the program’s cost.
    In the Adirondack Park, there are only dozens of primary care physicians serving the 6 million-acre forest land, which is bigger in area than some states. Health care administrators have said they are having a tougher time than ever recruiting and retaining doctors — one hospital this year pleaded for new doctors through mass mailings.
    The shortage is not isolated to primary care doctors and includes the full range of medical specialties from pediatricians to oncologists. The University at Albany’s Center for Health Workforce Studies reported there is roughly one doctor for every 535 residents in the counties that make up the bulk of the Adirondacks compared with one doctor for every 311 people in the state as a whole.
    “This is exactly what we’re calling for to head off a crisis,” said Dr. John Rugge, chief executive offi cer of the Hudson Headwaters Health Network in the Adirondacks. “We know without this kind of program, doctors are going to disappear from the North Country.”

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Address includes call for more educators, research money
BY MICHAEL GOOT Gazette Reporter

    Hiring 2,000 new educators at the state’s public universities, creating a $4 billion higher education endowment fund, eliminating junk food from schools and looking for school property tax relief are all on Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s to-do list for 2008.
    “Without world-class education, we cannot have a world-class economy,” he said Wednesday during his second State of the State address. “Last year, we focused on pre-school to grade 12. This year, we must also look beyond high school to our colleges and universities.”
    Spitzer wants to add 2,000 State University and City University educators, including 250 “eminent scholars,” who are professors involved in research that draws grants and collaboration from around the world. The governor’s Commission on Higher Education made this recommendation in its report last month.
    He also wants to create an innovation fund to promote research at New York’s public and private colleges.
    “Supercharging cutting-edge academic research will also supercharge our innovation economy,” he said.
    Spitzer also proposed creating a public higher education endowment fund with at least $4 billion, which he said would generate $200 million in operating funds each year.
    “Higher education funding should no longer be a budgetary pawn or a yearly battle. It must be a permanent priority,” he said.
    To fund this, he suggested having a private company run the New York State Lottery, with money from a franchise fee funding the endowment.
    In an effort to address rising property taxes, Spitzer is appointing a study commission, and noted that school spending accounts for about 70 percent of all property taxes. Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, who was Spitzer’s rival in the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial primary, will lead the commission.
    Spitzer opened the idea of a legislated tax limit. “A tax cap is a blunt instrument, but it forces hard choices and discipline when nothing else works,” he said. His speech drew mostly praise from education officials, though they expressed concern about any tax caps.
    Spitzer also called on the Legislature to pass the Healthy Schools Act to eliminate junk food in the effort to battle childhood obesity.
    “In New York, one in four children is obese, and that number is rising. Left unchanged, we are sentencing a huge number of our children to a lifetime of serious illness,” he said. He is asking the Department of Health to send him a progress report.
    He called for a bill guaranteeing New York’s returning combat veterans a benefit covering the full cost of tuition at SUNY and CUNY.
    SUNY Interim Chancellor John B. Clark praised the idea of an endowment for the university.
    Fred Floss, president of United University Professions — representing more than 34,000 higher education faculty — endorsed the governor’s efforts to invest in the higher education system.
    “Rebuilding the ranks of our full-time faculty at SUNY and the City University of New York is absolutely critical to rebuilding New York’s financial future, and we applaud the governor for seeing that connection,” he said in a press release.
    Floss said SUNY needs 1,600 more full-time faculty. He added that full funding of SUNY is necessary because in the past several years, it turned away 7,500 community college students because of the shortage of full-time faculty.
SCHENECTADY CITED
    The governor singled out the Schenectady City School District as one of the 55 participating in one of his signature initiatives last year, the Contracts for Excellence.
    Last year, the state increased spending on education from $17.7 billion to $19.2 billion. The state distributed nearly a half-billion dollars in additional Contracts for Excellence aid to 55 school districts to reduce class sizes in the early grades, lengthen the school day and improve teaching.
    Spitzer pointed out that all of Schenectady’s elementary schools have “master teachers” and the middle schoolers are enrolled in smaller class sizes.
    Superintendent Eric Ely said these teachers, which they call instructional coaches, train other teachers on how to adapt their teaching methods to different learning styles.
    “Obviously, we’re happy that our efforts are being recognized,” he said.
    The district also used its $15.5 million in additional state aid to hire teachers to reduce class sizes at the middle school and start afterschool programs.
    Ely expressed concern about the tax cap idea, adding that the federal government’s cost-of-living rate does not take into account the price of fuel and food.
    “It’s a little trickier than slapping a number on there and saying ‘you can’t go beyond this percentage.’ You have to either generate revenue or you have to cut — one way or the other,” he said. “If we start cutting programs, it goes directly against what I would consider to be the Contract for Excellence.”
    No arguments surfaced about junk food.
    Ely said the school district already has banned junk food and increased its physical education requirement. Students have physical education at least every other day and they have required healthful snacks and low-fat foods.
    Bob Hanlon, spokesman for the Scotia-Glenville School District, said the district has eliminated the junk food from vending machines. They serve skim milk instead of whole milk. They have also restricted classroom parties where food is served — such as birthday parties — to twice a month. It has also increased its physical education programs.
UNION SUPPORT
    New York State United Teachers President Dick Iannuzzi said the union is pleased with the governor’s focus on higher education because any talk of revitalizing the upstate economy with new jobs will require educated people to fill those jobs.
    He said the union supports the governor’s theme of accountability in education. However, Iannuzzi said the union has expressed concern about the possibility of a tax cap.
    “Our fear is that blunt instrument could butcher the progress we’ve made in schools,” he said.
    Iannuzzi pointed out a number of factors that contribute to high education costs, including health care expenses and the fact that New York state demands more of its teachers, for example, requiring teachers to get a master’s degree.
    He also said he worries that wealthier communities may have the ability to override the tax caps.
    “If that is the case, we’re just going to draw a greater spread between the richer and poorer communities with respect to addressing the achievement gap of our students. That isn’t something we want to see happening,” he said.
    The New York State School Boards Association has already come out in opposition to a property tax cap.
    “Any solution to the spiraling property taxes must address the root causes: soaring health insurance costs, pension obligations, the rising cost of energy, state and federal mandates and laws that severely disadvantage school boards in the collective bargaining process,” Executive Timothy G. Kremer said in a statement.
    The School Administrators Association of New York State, which represents more than 6,800 school administrators, supervisors and coordinators, also said it does not support a property tax cap because it is a matter of local control.

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Gov. Spitzer and lowering of local taxes
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

    I took note yesterday of Gov. Spitzer’s alarm, expressed in his State of the State address, about ever-rising property taxes and of his proposal to create a commission to get at the “root causes” of the problem.
    “It’s a losing game for the taxpayer if the state gives you a rebate check on Monday and then on Tuesday your local government taxes it away,” he declared, and who can disagree?
    But if he wants to get at the root causes he might start with his own support for such giveaways to the unions as his phony Wicks reform, which purports to make it easier for school districts to contract for construction projects but in fact just encourages them to use expensive union labor.
    Or he might consider the effect of his shutting down recognition of new apprenticeship programs in the construction trades, which was another giveaway to the unions and which can only further reduce competition and thus drive up prices for local governments and schools, since they are obliged, thanks to state law, to do business with contractors that have apprentice programs.
    The same goes for legislators who huff and puff about property taxes but then vote in favor of every bill handed to them by the publicemployee unions, guaranteed to drive up those taxes.
    These guys like to have it both ways, I’ve noticed.
    The governor, for example, praised small classes, favorably mentioning some as small 10 students, which is one of the main desiderata of the teachers’ unions (it translates into less work), but the only way to have such small classes is to hire more teachers, which necessarily means higher taxes.
    So I’m not going to get too excited yet about all this passion in Albany to lower our local property taxes but will wait and see.
SCHUMER AND SUDDABY
    Sen. Chuck Schumer visited us the other day here at the Gazette, which was nice, since it gave me the opportunity to ask him how the appointment of Glenn Suddaby for a federal judgeship stands, Suddaby being the U.S. attorney for this area.
    He replied, “It’ll happen in the next three or four months,” and further it will happen with his support, which was not so nice, from my perspective, since it was Suddaby who was in charge of the prosecution of Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, the two Albany Muslims who were tricked by the FBI and ultimately sent to prison for their gullibility.
    Schumer said he has an arrangement with the White House whereby the White House picks two or three judges to one pick by him, and each side can veto the other’s choices. Suddaby, he explained, was the White House’s choice, not his, but he will not veto him.
    “Overall, I think Suddaby is a pretty good guy, a good U.S. attorney,” he said, though he courteously took note of my own indignant reportage of the Aref-Hossain case.
    Suddaby himself has characterized the case as “putting them to the test,” that is, trying to see if the two men would do something illegal when encouraged by an agent provocateurunder FBI control, and that seems to me a poor way to run a justice system, putting to the test people who are not otherwise breaking the law or even showing any inclination to break the law.
    I was also dismayed by Suddaby’s assistant at the trial grilling the defendants about their beliefs, which to me smacked of McCarthyism.
    I am not happy that someone who takes such an approach to justice will soon be given a black robe and a gavel. I’m sorry it’s going to happen, and I’m sorry that Sen. Schumer supports it.

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Governor property tax cap a hot potato
BY MICHAEL GORMLEY The Associated Press

    ALBANY — For more than a decade, New York state’s elected officials in floor debates and campaigns have loudly and proudly taken on one of New York’s biggest problems — high property taxes.
    And for more than a decade, they made it worse.
    Gov. Eliot Spitzer, however, is now proposing what was long thought impossible. He wants to cap local property taxes, primarily by addressing spending by school districts, which account for 70 percent of property tax bills. He sees that as the way to end the days of tax bills rising faster than student achievement, despite billions of dollars in extra state subsidies to schools to relieve taxes and in rebate checks mailed to taxpayers at election time.
    It’s a simple concept that economists and New Yorkers from Hicksville to Niagara Falls figured out ages ago. But it has been a third rail for state politicians, most of whom are seen as beholden to public employee unions and the easy votes that increases in school aid can provide.
    The New York State United Teachers union immediately called a tax cap “problematic in concept and disastrous in practice.”
    “It will be important to ensure that any tax relief proposals fairly reflect the state’s commitment to ensuring all children those who live in poverty as well as those who are advantaged receive the quality public education they deserve,” said NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi. The union has 585,000 members and is one of Albany’s biggest campaign contributors and lobbyists.
    Such “it’s-for-the-kids” arguments have helped secure billions of dollars, even in tough economic times. But Spitzer is now arguing that once the kids get out of school, they are increasingly being forced into exile, taking jobs away from their hometowns and families, away from New York. He said high property taxes that have driven away employers is a big part of the reason.
    “We need to start getting real about our property tax crisis,” Spitzer said in Wednesday’s State of the State speech. “Wherever I go, I hear the same thing: Property taxes are too high. We cannot grow if property taxes continue to force young people out of the state and our seniors out of their homes. Together, we have tried to address this crisis.”
    “But after ensuring more than $5 billion in STAR property tax relief each year and spending more than a billion dollars on the state takeover of Medicaid costs, property taxes just keep going up,” Spitzer said. “In the end, it’s a losing game for the taxpayer.”
    Spitzer had enough last year after he and the Legislature provided a historic increase in the STAR tax relief — $1.3 billion worth. Yet school taxes still increased around the five-year average of 7 percent.
    To break the pattern, he went to a powerful governor’s tool. He is creating a commission with investigative and subpoena powers under the state’s Moreland Act — something governors resort to rarely. Without a visible grimace, Spitzer also picked one of his most persistent critics to head the commission: Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, who forced Spitzer in to a sometimes testy Democratic primary in 2006.
    Spitzer says the commission isn’t a way to avoid action, as so many blue-ribbon panels do in Albany. Suozzi, a lawyer and accountant who took on his own police union, guarantees it.
    “I wouldn’t participate if that was the case,” Suozzi said in the Capitol’s halls Wednesday as he buttonholed lawmakers, asking them to help his commission. “I think the governor is very sincere.”
    Suozzi will have a staff and a bipartisan commission to back up recommendations for a tax cap. The commission will also reconsider the state’s own unfunded mandates on schools and municipalities and recommend ways to cut waste in education without hurting instruction, as well as how to direct tax breaks more to middle class families.

Wow big surprise the teachers union is opposed to a property tax cap because the teachers will have to hold down their raises to a reasonable level.

Don't hold your breath on that one shadow. The head of the teachers union was on TV and he said that if this passes, than THE PEOPLE are going to have to decide what services they will want to cut from their school curriculum. He made it clear that the teachers were NOT going to take a cut in pay or benefits.

I think that the residents of a school district should be voting on their raises. After all it is WE THE TAXPAYER that foots the bill. We should have the voice in this decision.  Put it up for a vote instead of letting the unions pander to the state politicians for their raise. Make the raise seperate from the school budget!

If all the school districts in the state stick together and come up with a fair pay scale for the teachers and it's not acceptable to the teachers then they can find work elsewhere. After being unemployed and not being able to feed their families and pay their bills the teachers may think twice about not accepting the salary that was offered.          

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

Getting to the root of high
property taxes
    One thing I always enjoy about government, at any level, is its detestation of taxes and its great enthusiasm for reducing them. It always makes me wonder where those taxes came from in the first place — Mars, Saturn, the great taxphantom in the sky?
    Now we have Gov. Eliot Spitzer and his co-protagonists in state government drama, Sen. Joe Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver on the occasion of the annual presentation of the governor’s budget.
    The governor proposes getting to the bottom of this tax mystery by having a commission ascertain “the root causes of New York’s high property taxes” and make recommendations for limiting them.
    In the meantime he will provide “$5 billion of total immediate property tax relief,” he says, and increase by $91 million the rebates given to old people for their school taxes.
    He avoids saying so, but my suspicion is that the $5 billion and the $91 million will come not from Mars or Saturn but simply from the state’s own pot of tax money, meaning money that we contributed from our left pocket rather than our right pocket and so will not amount to actual relief but will just be a bookkeeping shift.
    I mean, the state doesn’t have any money of its own, apart from what we give it, and neither does it have access to the property taxes we pay to our local governments and our school districts so that it could somehow refund us any of that money.
    But Idon’t want to be a nitpicker or an ingrate, and if the state of New York sends me another check for a few hundred dollars this year as it did last year, I will certainly cash it, and I’ll do it fast too.
    I did notice, however, that in addition to congratulating himself for helping us with our local property taxes, the governor also congratulated himself for saving the state money vis-a-vis local governments. Specifically, he proposed making county governments pay a larger share of the welfare burden, “saving the state,” he said, “a total of $76 million.”
    Isn’t that interesting? He will save the state $76 million by foisting that much in expense off onto the counties. But since counties get their money from property taxes, that means … well, you can figure out for yourself what it means.
    You can see how this goes around and around, and I don’t believe one commission is going to be enough to get at the root of it. I think you would need at least a dozen commissions, and that many mathematicians.
    After they have done the math and have determined if a $76 million saving to the state isn’t counterbalanced by a $76 million increase in local property taxes, which the state will then defray in the form of rebate checks by raising our state taxes the corresponding amount, after that, they can get to work on one possible root cause of high property taxes, and that is the Taylor Law.
    The Taylor Law, and its corollary, the Triborough Amendment, which not only give government workers the right to organize but guarantee that any benefit ever written into a labor contract can never be removed without the workers’ consent, so that the cost to local governments can only go up and up.
    Did a local government or school board years ago offer free health insurance? Then free health insurance it is, forever.
    Per the law, public-employee contracts never expire, and despite what you occasionally read in the newspaper, public employees are never “working without a contract.”
    Might that be a root cause of ever-rising property taxes? I will hold my breath and wait for the ruling of the governor’s commission.

Someone help us out of this brown paper bag.....

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Spitzer taking friendlier tone in his 2nd year
Pent-up lawmaker resentment after speech hurt ’07 progress
BY MICHAEL GORMLEY The Associated Pres

    ALBANY — A year ago, a brash Eliot Spitzer in his first day on the job belted out an inauguration speech that declared that New York had “slept through much of the past decade while the rest of the world has passed us by.”
    No lawmaker dared challenge the firebrand reformer who had just won election by a historic share of the vote. That Jan. 1, Spitzer chastised the Legislature and former Gov. George Pataki for taking the “easy” way, “looking the other way while costs rise, debts mount and families lose ground. Easy is what we’ve had, but easy is not where we need to go.“
    Lawmakers simply had to sit there, freezing in their seats at the outdoor coronation, taking it.
    But a year after that pent-up resentment evolved into one of New York’s most intransigent political gridlocks and a loss of the governor’s popular and political clout, a new Spitzer may be emerging.
    In his two major presentations of this year — the State of the State address Jan. 9 and his budget proposal Tuesday — Spitzer took great effort to recognize, thank and even try to joke with lawmakers in both houses and both parties. Internally, Spitzer is even considering naming a Hudson River park for Pataki.
    In the State of the State address almost three weeks ago, he ignored snickering senators and their heckling to single out several Republicans — even when their colleagues derided them for getting Spitzer’s favor with laughs and a “There goes your re-election!”
    But Spitzer, uncharacteristically, didn’t fight back.
    In his budget address a week later, he refused to rule out any spending increases sought by the Legislature, despite underscoring the need to hold growth to 5 percent.
    Spitzer spoke of not wanting to jeopardize this new “very cordial relationship” with the Legislature, saying they play a “critical role” in how the state will be run.
    “I look forward to their wisdom,” Spitzer said with a straight face.
    His budget proposal also seems to restore an Albany tradition by governors to allow room for the Legislature to add, particularly in school aid and property tax relief. Last year, the Spitzer administration refused to play an insiders’ game that fueled high spending. But lawmakers don’t just do the bidding of lobbyists and campaign contributors, as Spitzer 1.0 implied. They also listen to constituents, and they can listen to more New Yorkers than a governor can.
    Spitzer is right: Leaving room for the Legislature’s spending is a game. But it’s also a face-saving game that has worked.
    And it helps the relationship that a pay raise for lawmakers remains on the table, mostly because Spitzer has softened his opposition in recent months.
    Behind the scenes, Spitzer shuffl ed his staff. They have also held numerous briefings with reporters to explain his spending and policy plans instead of, as they did a year ago, announcing them in press conferences and expecting the sheer brilliance of the position to do the work.
    Now, a major insider, new Director of State Operations Paul Francis, has been allowed to emerge as an effective voice to explain Spitzer policies. Other Spitzer staffers are working with the staff of Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno for the first time in months.
    For now, Spitzer and Bruno, after one of the most contentious periods in anyone’s memory, have turned the volume down.
    On Wednesday, Bruno was asked if he was upset that Spitzer didn’t appoint any lawmakers to his special commission to examine ways to cut property taxes — a perennial top issue for the Senate Republicans — including a cap on local property taxes. It was a softball right down the middle. But Bruno, uncharacteristically, checked his swing.
    “It’s not a problem at all,” Bruno told reporters. “If it makes sense ... that’s the way to go.”
    It’s far from the last half of 2007, when those legislators who listened to his inaugural speech slowly fought back. Conflict turned into gridlock as tabloid headlines of scandal and Spitzer’s own doomed plan to make it easier for illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses drove his popularity from near 70 percent to less than 40 percent. By the time it was over, most New Yorkers said they would vote for someone else next time.
    But this month’s Siena College poll showed that Spitzer’s popularity is ticking up for the first time in months. The sense of humor he once used to disarm, then enlist, opponents is back.
    Is it real, and will it last? No one knows for sure.
    But perhaps more importantly, no one seems to care much. For now, it’s enough to try to get along.
    Then again, Albany doesn’t become a contact sport for another week or so, this legislative election year. That’s when budget priorities, ideologies and egos begin to clash.

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County leaders say Spitzer budget would hike local taxes
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
The Associated Press

ALBANY — County executives say Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposed state budget would force increases in local property taxes.
The New York State Association of Counties says the proposal cuts aid to counties instead of providing an increase of $500 million that Spitzer claims.
Democratic and Republican county executives say Spitzer’s budget would force more costs for social services, juvenile incarceration and other expenses on county taxpayers.
NYSAC plans to work with Spitzer and the Legislature to restore funding to the budget, which Spitzer wants to hold to about a 5-percent increase because of a worsening economy.
Spitzer disagrees with the county leaders. He says all parts of government need to reduce spending and cut taxes.

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Democratic and Republican county executives say Spitzer’s budget would force more costs for social services, juvenile incarceration and other expenses on county taxpayers.

Interesting...MORE OF THESE COSTS are going to go to the county?  If you listen to Sue Savage, the reason taxes are so high is because we already pay ALL of these costs.

Who's wrong?

CUT SPENDING! CUT SOME OF THESE PROGRAMS! ELIMINATE THE CUSHY KOSIUR JOBS! Now you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure this one out!