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SCHENECTADY
Budget talks go down to the wire Blanchfield, Stratton disagree about cuts
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    With just hours left before the city budget is to be adopted today, a laundry list of cuts was still under consideration and the mayor was still threatening to veto the council’s final decision.
    Councilman Mark Blanchfield, finance committee chairman, said Friday he has reduced some of his cuts in light of the strong opposition from department heads.
    He’s backed off on his prediction of $190,000 in building permits, and he said he’s willing to give the city a little more money to repair fire trucks.
    But many of the cuts will remain, he said.
    “I’ve got to call around and see what the support is,” he added, referring to whether he has enough votes to pass his version of the budget, which cuts roughly $1 million from the $76.9 million spending plan. The meeting is 10 a.m. today in the council chamber.
    Mayor Brian U. Stratton wanted the council to postpone the fi nal vote until after the state Legislature’s special session on Nov. 18. That session might lead to cuts in state aid, which would send the council back to the drawing board, he argued. He said he’d rather wait until then to talk about wholesale cuts to the budget, and then cut only as much as would be needed to balance the budget. But Blanchfield said he will ask the council to vote today at 10 a.m. at City Hall. “My preference would be to try to pass it if we can,” he said. If the council supports his plan, it could pass a budget with no tax increase. “I think it’s very possible,” Blanchfield said.
    The mayor’s proposed 2009 budget calls for a 2.9 percent tax increase.
    If the council delays action, no decision will be made until after the election, which might affect how voters view Blanchfield on Election Day.
    Stratton has accused Blanchfi eld of making cuts to win votes in his effort to unseat Assemblyman George Amedore Jr., R-Rotterdam. The comment was unusual because both Stratton and Blanchfield are Democrats, as are the other council members. Blanchfield said he didn’t understand why Stratton would attack a fellow Democrat, but Stratton said he didn’t understand why Blanchfield would attack his spending plan.
    “For four years we worked together. Everything was fi ne. Now this. What has changed?” Stratton said Friday.
    Blanchfield argued Friday that his decision to go ahead with a vote had nothing to do with the election.
    “If it had something to do with the election, I could have kept my hands off and then voted no. But that’s not what the people elected me to do,” Blanchfield said. “Look, it’s a deadline. I think it sends a message to people that we are trying to make an effort to trim expenses and bracing ourselves going forward.”
    Stratton said he was “not encouraged” by Blanchfield’s fi nal budget review session on Thursday and said he may veto the budget if the council passes it today.
    “I haven’t ruled out what I’m going to do, based on the cuts,” Stratton said. “We must have a budget that is achievable.”
    He said he’d veto the budget “if it’s going to set us up for even more compounded fiscal problems.”

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Council OKs Schenectady budget with no tax hike
Saturday, November 1, 2008
By Tatiana Zarnowski (Contact)
Gazette Reporter

SCHENECTADY — The City Council voted 6-1 on Saturday to approve a $75.7 million spending plan that cuts budgeted expenses for several departments and won't raise property taxes next year.
Mayor Brian U. Stratton, who had threatened to veto the proposed budget if the cuts went through, declined to comment at the special meeting on whether he will veto the budget. He has 10 days to do so, though the council needs only five votes to overturn a veto.
"We're going to look at this budget carefully," he said.
Councilman Mark Blanchfield presented $914,363 worth of revised cuts to the council at the Saturday morning meeting. The cuts allow property taxes to remain at their current level or even be reduced slightly - perhaps a 0.25 percent decrease, Blanchfield estimated.
"It's our view that this is not a time to increase the level of services," he said.
The mayor's proposed budget called for a 2.9 percent tax increase.
Many of the cuts were made to individual line items that weren't completely spent in the past. In those years, the resulting surplus was shifted into the city's fund balance, which is $1.6 million.
Two positions that are slated to be cut are not currently filled, Blanchfield said. But finance consultant John Paolino warned the council that the cuts will affect how quickly and how well the city will be able to address public needs.
The budget removes an appraiser from the assessment office and $70,000 in assessment service fees, which Assessor Pat Mastro said will stretch his office thin. In the past, the city has allowed property owners who were challenging their assessment to sit with staff for an informal review before a formal hearing.
"We won't have the opportunity to do informal reviews with this cut in spending," Mastro told the council Saturday.
But Blanchfield said the cuts won't affect essential city services.
"I don't think it's appropriate for this council to be blamed, or that the people should be scared somehow," he said.
Councilman Gary McCarthy cast the sole "no" vote, saying afterward he would like to see the police department get more funds to improve its response times.
Councilman Joseph Allen said he is concerned about how much the state will cut aid to municipalities after its special legislative session Nov. 18.
"I'm waiting for the shoe to fall from the state and federal government as far as their cutbacks," Allen said. "I think we're probably going to have to come back and make adjustments to this budget."
The city charter requires a final budget by Nov. 1, but Stratton had urged the council not to pass a spending plan until later in the month.
"These are extenuating circumstances," he said.
A proposed 3 percent pay raise for Stratton was removed from the budget. He makes $96,706 a year.

Quoted from bumblethru

These guys (statton/blanchfield) should get an academy award for their excellent performance. And the category...."THE BEST PERFORMANCE BY A DUO TRYING TO HELP ONE WIN AN ASSEMBLY ELECTION!"

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Sorry, Mr. Stratton

First published in print: Monday, November 3, 2008

There was Brian Stratton, looking for, get this, a raise. Yes, another raise.
     
The $96,706 that the very able mayor of Schenectady is earning suddenly wasn't enough, not even after a 60 percent raise kicked in back in January, at the start of his second term. With the City Council working on next year's budget, Mr. Stratton was seeking an additional 3 percent increase that would have pushed his salary to $99,607.

The council, though, thought better of that. The $76.9 million budget it approved on Saturday puts the mayor's quest to rest, at least for now. The new budget also avoids what was going to be a 2.9 percent property tax increase. That part required cutting city spending by almost a million dollars — $914,363, to be precise — and leaving a job in the city assessor's office and another in the city clerk's office unfilled.

Someone has the priorities straight in Schenectady city government when it comes to the mayor's salary, even if it's not Mr. Stratton. He ought to know better than to think of himself as one more city employee and to rely upon language in the city charter that says the mayor is supposed to get the same raise as the city's other nonunion employees. He should understand once and for all that the mayor's salary isn't something to adjust in the middle of a term. That means no raises, not for him and not for anyone who might succeed him, until 2012 at the earliest.

Yes, Mr. Stratton was woefully underpaid during his first four years in office. He more than earned his $60,500 salary as he helped rescue the city from fiscal ruin. But an underpaid mayor is no longer among Schenectady's problems.

New York's dire fiscal straits probably will mean less state aid for Schenectady next year, as Mr. Stratton himself acknowledges. He worries that the budget approved by the council is a return to past practices of overestimating revenues and underestimating expenditures.

That $11.8 million the city now receives from the state accounts for about 15 percent of its budget. It's among the mayor's accomplishments, in fact, that Schenectady is getting so much more money from the state than it once did.

"There is a huge tsunami coming down the pipe. We'll probably be back at the budget table again after Nov. 18," the mayor says in reference to a special session of the state Legislature in just two weeks.

Two thoughts, then. We're not sure there's any such thing as a small tsunami. And when Schenectady does reopen its budget, as the mayor predicts it will have to, let's hope Mr. Stratton remembers how adequately paid he is.

The Issue:

The Schenectady City Council denies a raise for the mayor.

The Stakes:

Wasn't a 60 percent pay increase earlier this year enough?

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SCHENECTADY
Stratton OKs 2009 city budget Mayor has reservations about council’s cuts
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    Despite calling the 2009 budget unachievable and irresponsible, the mayor signed it Monday and said he would make it work.
    “The [City Council] exercised their role. Now I have to exercise my role and do whatever I can to live within that budget,” Mayor Brian U. Stratton said. “I think it’s going to be tough.”
    He said he signed the $75.7 million budget because it was clear the council would override him if he vetoed it.
    “It wouldn’t serve any purpose. The vote was 6 to 1,” Stratton said, referring to the council’s budget adoption a week ago.
    The spending plan they sent to his desk was $1 million below the budget he proposed a month ago, and includes no tax increase. Stratton’s budget had a 2.9 percent tax increase.
    Among the cuts approved by the council to eliminate the tax increase were many items that have gone unspent each year, but department heads argued those budget lines would be critical if they needed extra cash next year.
    Stratton agreed, saying Monday that the council had eliminated the city’s safety net.
    “They were generally valid [cuts] but we built in flexibility in our budget to have the room to maneuver,” Stratton said. “Maybe we’ve performed so well the council, in its wisdom, has said we’ve proven we don’t need it.”
    He took particular exception to two changes in the budget — a reduction in spending at the assessor’s office and an increase over his projected revenue in building permits.
    Stratton said the assessment office cut will hurt the city’s ability to finish the property revaluation “efficiently and effectively.”
    The cut would allow a consultant to work until July 1, as the assessor had planned, rather than funding the position for an entire year in case more work is needed.
    Finance Committee Chairman Mark Blanchfield said the position never should have been proposed for full-year funding.
    “On its best day, it was only supposed to be for a half-year,” he said. “If July first comes and goes and the work of the consultant hasn’t finished, I’d be more than willing to look at another unfilled position and look at where the need is.”
    He stressed that he proposed the cut after discussing it with Assessor Patrick Mastro. “It was not done in haste,” he said.
    As for the building permit revenue, Blanchfield argued that he’d reduced the projected revenue by $40,000, as compared to the earnings in 2008.
    But the revenue projection is $25,000 higher than Stratton had proposed.
    “That represents $25 million in building value,” Stratton said. “I think next year is going to be a soft year.”
    Blanchfield countered by saying that Building Inspector Keith Lamp had approved the new projection.
    Work on the budget may not be over yet. On Nov. 18, the state Legislature will meet to cut $2 billion from its 2008 budget in response to the growing deficit. Among the cuts may be aid to municipalities.
    Stratton has joined a group of mayors fighting that prospect, but he said he doesn’t expect to win. “My guess is we’ll be back at the
chopping block soon,” he said.

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Despite calling the 2009 budget unachievable and irresponsible, the mayor signed it Monday and said he would make it work.
    “The [City Council] exercised their role. Now I have to exercise my role and do whatever I can to live within that budget,” Mayor Brian U. Stratton said. “I think it’s going to be tough.”
    He said he signed the $75.7 million budget because it was clear the council would override him if he vetoed it.

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Mayors Ponder Cuts In State Aid

November 13, 2008 - 12:12AM

Schenectady Mayor Brian Stratton suggested Wednesday there may be a time coming when city services residents are accustomed are not what they used to be.


"I think the bottom line is everybody knows this state and this country are entering uncharted waters and unprecedented fiscally challenging times and we certrainly have to do our part, and I just hope the people of this city know that doing our part may mean a reduction in the services they receive."


Stratton was responding to questions raised by Governor David Paterson's announcement that Aid and Incentives for Municipalities (AIM) funding for municipalities outside  New York City would be the same for 2009-10 budgets as it is for the current 2008-09 budgets. Stratton said the budget the city council passed on November 1 includes 12.8 million dollars in AIM funding. Under Paterson's plan the city would receive only 11.8 million, the same amount the city received for the current budget year.

"We've already cut away everything that we think that we can so where do we go now to cut another $500,000?" Answering his own question, Stratton said the city would look at "people...police overtime...a range of any possibilities." Stratton said some streets may not get paved, some park improvements may not happen and some street lights may not get the maintennance they could use. Stratton said he has not yet considered the possibility of city workers losing their jobs but said he has not ruled out anything. As for the 2.9% property tax increase the city council removed from the mayor's proposed budget, the mayor said  "I would certainly look at that, too but I think you have to do that in the context of whatever the final vote is in the legislature." The New York State Assembly is expected to convene November 18 for the purpose of amending the state budget.

On Wednesday a spokesman for Albany Mayor Jerry Jennings said the mayor does not want to talk about how Paterson's plan might affect Albany until he sees exactly what the assembly does on the 18th. For 2009, Albany can expect no more than the thirteen million dollars in state aid it received for the current budget, an amount Jennings has said is far less than Albany should be getting.

In Troy, Mayor Harry Tutunjian said he expects the state financial crisis to have an especially deep effect on school funding.  Asked whether city schools might have to go without sports or music programs, Tutunjian said, "It's too soon to say. I haven't spoken to any of the superintendents yet in Lansingburg or Troy but they'll have some tough changes ahead but we'll have to adapt. It's a tough time across the board."

Tutunjian said because any given Troy city budget includes AIM funding from the previous year, the budget that is now going through hearings is in good shape. "This will give us ample time make changes for the 2010 budget, which we'll be working on in June of 2009."