- By Marcia E. Lynch
- News
Print 
The local delegation met with senior staff for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, and Governor Andrew Cuomo, and with Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton.
Paramount in their message was New York counties’ ongoing need for mandate relief, particularly a phase-out of the local funding requirement for Medicaid. Calling Medicaid “the most burdensome state mandate,” the officials maintained the requirement is “inequitable and out of step with efforts to control costs in the program” and inconsistent with practices of other states—where 22 states do not require any local funding and the rest require only a minimal local contribution.
Acknowledging that the Governor’s proposal to reduce local Medicaid spending growth is a start, they say it’s not enough— that what’s really needed is an immediate freeze on local contributions to the cost of Medicaid and gradual State assumption of all non-federal Medicaid costs over the next eight years, as advocated in proposed legislation before the State Senate.
Now is the time to do it, notes Chair Robertson, since it would come at a time when the State benefits from revenues from the federal Affordable Care Act. With Medicaid expense representing 28% of the Tompkins County property tax levy, and a much greater proportion in many other counties, Robertson notes State assumption of local Medicaid costs would amount to “the single biggest thing that could be done to benefit state property tax payers.”
In their meetings, the officials also advanced other issues of importance to Tompkins and other counties, including
- Concern about $11 million in indigent legal services program funds that would be lost by County indigent defense programs, under the Governor’s proposed budget.
- A more than 30% reduction—nearly $8 million statewide—to Youth Programs, targeting youth development and delinquency, special delinquency prevention, and runaway and homeless youth.
- The need to exempt Tompkins and 17 other counties in the process of selling their county-owned Certified Home Health Agencies (CHHAs) from proposed new emergency regulations governing establishment of new home health agencies.
- A call for the State to assume its responsibility for eradicating the aquatic plant, hydrilla, to prevent it from choking the State’s navigable waterways—that $700,000 to $1 million be allocated each year for the next five to eight years to fund an aggressive efforts to eradicate the plant in Tompkins County before it spreads to the other Finger Lakes and the Great Lakes; and to support legislation, modeled after California law, to allow a rapid, flexible response to the appearance of hydrilla and other invasive aquatic species.
v8i5