License To Steal: The Town’s 2012 Budget Is Passed

In what is being hailed as her final act of defiance against the Town Board that has followed The Paul’s lead in ostracizing her, Town Councilwoman Sonya Brown voted against the rubber-stamping Town Board’s adoption of the 2012 Operating Budget. She voiced concerns about how job cuts and layoffs were handled and said more efforts were needed to share services within town departments and neighboring school districts. Apparently Brown now knows how her constituency has felt for so many years!

ABG is proud to have spearheaded the charge against The Paul and his blatant effort to appoint two patronage positions to friends. Fortunately, ABG, and others, forced him to abandon his ill-conceived and wasteful plan. This “embarrassed savings” of roughly $80k could easily be used to fund the two positions cut in this budget. While we are hopeful to see the two positions restored, one was a lifeguard and the other was an assistant to the Town’s attorney. ABG hates to see anyone lose their jobs. The Paul stated, “The cuts are manageable,” he said, “people aren’t going to see major quality-of-life changes that are going to be negative.” The Paul also said, “The budget was cut largely by eliminating vacant positions.” Eliminating vacant positions isn’t really cutting anything and is a copout when discussing how you balanced the budget.

The demoralizing news, however, is that The Paul and his Stepford Board uses $1.3 million from the fund balance to reduce the need for even deeper cuts and limit the tax-rate increase. Raiding the fund balance to offset increasing taxes now will only bring pain through delayed increases later on. After twenty years of kicking this can down the road, how much longer should we expect this to continue before The Paul’s house of cards falls? 

So, instead of cutting six positions as originally projected by The Paul, he “only” cut two. ABG doesn’t know what the assistant to the Town’s attorney does and whether it will affect anyone but the Town Attorney, Tim Lewis. The lifeguard, while probably not a high budget dollar amount, is nonetheless an important one if you are swimming in a Town pool. It is increasingly difficult to get lifeguards for the amount of money they are paid, the monotony of the job and the rotating shifts they stuck working. ABG had previously stated that we didn’t believe the layoff number from The Paul and that it was a ploy. We still believe those two positions could be restored. 

Councilwoman Brown also commented on sharing services more throughout the Town and the school districts. While ABG agrees that shared services are worth looking at, we also know that every group doesn’t want anything to change in their little fiefdom. So while the intentions are good, people need to be elected with term limits so they can make the necessary changes knowing they won’t be staying too long anyway. Plus, while The Paul talks about consolidating services, he has done little, if any, to implement it.

Some other issues that are in this year’s budget:

• The annual salary for the next court administrator will be cut from $100,000 to $80,000. You’ll recall Regina Hill masterfully played The Paul, getting him to parlay her “meager” $75k salary to $100k? After only eight months on the job – just long enough to be offered the position she was interested in all along in Port Chester, she said sayonara suckers.

• The contribution to the Greenburgh Library will be cut by $250,000 to $2.6 million. Does this mean we’ll have another day of closings for the ill-run ski chalet? 

• An additional night court on Wednesdays will help the town clear a backlog of an estimated 80,000 traffic tickets. Did the interns sign up for more work or is this just a convenient buzz word from The Paul, looking for a sound bit for increasing revenues?

The board also voted separately on an $8.8 million capital projects budget:

• Borrow $6.2 million to help pay for various items:

• $1.5 million for road repaving. Isn’t road repaving part of infrastructure and isn’t that infrastructure supposed to be included in the budget anyway? Or is this still another fund that was raided by The Paul to pay for yet another illegal trip out of the Theodore Young Center?

• $500,000 for a new software system. Is this a single purchase or an upgradeable lease into the future, allowing growth and expandability with the system over several years? Knowing how the Board operates, ABG guesses we could just flush the half a million down the toilet and accomplish the same thing. 

• $159,000 for radio upgrades and a license plate reader in the Police Department. Aren’t there grants for anything “police” under the sun? In the whole scheme of things, this is a small amount.

• Two million dollars is allocated to upgrade the Taxter Road Mulch and Yard Waste Transfer Site. Two million dollars for “mulch-anything” seems a bit extravagant!

• $2.5 million will be set aside for efforts by taxpayers to reduce their assessments. After sitting through all the certiorari adjustments at each Town Board meeting, clearly this is not enough money. It’s time for revaluation for the Town to finally put a stop to the financial hemmoraging the Town is caught in. Doing a revaluation will cause The Paul to loose a good portion of his senior citizen supporters. But it may also help to keep our taxes more in line with reality.

Of course, this is the Town of Greenburgh, where there’s always more muck and mire lurking under the next rock to be overturned. We need real management skills in the Town. The chances of getting any soon are like having a balanced budget in Greenburgh under The Paul. Maybe newly elected Town Board member Ken Jones can provide much of what is currently lacking with our Town Board. While we aren’t holding our breath, we can only hope.