Archive: Opinions

Last Wednesday County Legislator Pat Pryor reported that the entire tax rise in Tompkins County's 2013 budget will go toward paying for state mandates.  That means that local program funding had to be adjusted, with some programs seeing modest gains, but others cut to pay for the surviving ones.  Lansing Councilman Ed LaVigne asked her whether the County can fight back.

"Can you send it right back and say no, we're not going to take the mandates?" he asked.

"Of course you can do anything," Pryor replied.  "However I have been told the State can then bring to bear all the leverage it has to force us to comply, including taking us to court.  Because we are legally required to pay for these mandates, eventually we would lose in court.  Then we would not only have to pay, but we'd have to pay all the legal costs.  The other thing that would likely happen is that they would withhold money that's owed to us.  So they would have us in a vice grip, so to speak."

Last year Governor Andrew Cuomo lauded his mandate reform program.  But local representatives have told me that it was simply a political ploy without any real teeth.  Ancient mandates were indeed wiped off the books, they said, but that didn't prevent new ones from being imposed.  And most of the mandates that are really tying our county government's hands are still on the books.

Another political ploy, the so-called 2% Property Tax Cap plays into this.  The state has granted some exceptions to that law because of unfunded state mandates, so a taxing authority's allowable rise in the tax levy is almost always well above 2%.

Tompkins County and other taxing authorities around New York State are between a rock and a hard place, both of which are Albany.  The rock is the state limiting how much revenue a taxing authority can collect.  The hard place is forcing that same taxing authority to pay more and more for things it might not have chosen to do in quite that way, or at all.

When are legislators in Albany going to take responsibility for this travesty?  If mandates were funded by a progressive tax it would be slightly more palatable, because property owners on fixed and reduced incomes wouldn't be penalized for excesses that don't originate in their localities.  The income tax is a progressive tax that the state collects, therefore if the state paid for its mandates they would be more affordable across the board.

It is really a matter of fairness.  If people want to do something they should pay for it.  If people want other people to do something, the people who are imposing whatever it is should pay for it.

Whether it comes from a progressive or regressive tax, ultimately we all pay.  True mandate reform would eliminate most mandates, and fund the remaining ones.  Picture that happening in New York...

I never thought I would sympathize with the Tompkins County Government about tax rises because I have never thought of it as being frugal.  But I have to say that unfunded mandates have gotten way out of hand.  When a government has to struggle to pay for things it doesn't necessarily want while at the same time not being allowed to collect revenue needed to pay for it... why is this so hard when it seems so obvious?  Minimally all unfunded mandates should be illegal.  And funded mandates should be subject to periodic independent review.

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