Schenectady County Manager Rory Fluman has submitted a 2025 budget proposal.
Fluman’s $429 million plan was sent to the county legislature Monday. The proposal, up from the current $402 million adopted plan, does not include an increase in the property tax levy.
The spending plan is being welcomed by county legislature chair Gary Hughes. WAMC's Lucas Willard spoke with the Democrat on Tuesday.
Well, I'd say the first thing that I'm pleased with in the manager's proposed budget is that we've maintained our now our ninth year of zero increase on our property tax levy. That's an accomplishment for the county. It's part of the strategy that we've had for a number of years to try to maximize the revenue that we can collect from sales tax through economic growth, and take that burden of constantly increasing property taxes off our property tax property owners. So we've done that, and again this year in the face of some rising costs. So, it's quite an accomplishment, and it's a testament to, I think, that the economic growth in the county that we continue to experience
Is the legislature in lockstep with the county manager on this budget. Did you guys work closely together?
There certainly were some discussions between leadership, legislative leadership, and the manager. And I think it's safe to say that the manager, in many, most respects, if not all respects, the manager's budget this year will be the legislature's budget. There's the possibility that we may make some adjustments on the capital spending side, but they will not be that significant, and not really in opposition to anything the manager wanted to do. It's more of a of a timing issue, I guess I'd say.
What were some of the challenges that you observed in the county with regards to finances?
Well, I think you start with some of the cost increases that we experienced. And these are 2023 actual to 2025 budget, the percentages I was going to give you. And the reason that I went back two years to ‘23 is that we're still in 2024 so we don't necessarily have firm, firm, hard numbers on what some of these costs are going to be in the year we're in now. But if you compare our DSS spending, our social services spending in 2023 versus what the manager is budgeting, there's a 12% increase there. We're looking at an increase at Glendale Home of about those two years, about 20%. Library spend is up about 22% and we believe our employee health insurance, we self-insure, but nonetheless, we have all of those drug costs that everyone else has, is going to be up about 10% .Our Medicaid, of course, is capped in New York State thanks to the legislature a few years ago. But we're also responsible for any growth, and so just the growth in the county's Medicaid share ‘23 versus ’25, is about 13%. So, you can see with those kind of numbers that to be able to have zero on your property tax increase is a pretty significant accomplishment, and as I say, testament to the fact that our sales tax revenue continues to grow.
Now, I wanted to touch on the airport. I understand that there are some upgrades that are in the works.
Our capital program continues and, in fact, completes the repaving of the runways at the airport and the taxiways. So, we will have gone through that entire process by the time we've gone through Fiscal ‘25 with some assistance, obviously, from the federal government. The FAA is very generous on airport maintenance, but there's also some county funds in there. And the airport is a key piece for us. It's home to the Air Guard, and it's also a general aviation airport. So, in boths aspects, so we'll have we're continuing our maintenance there, continuing our upgrades there.
