Hevesi, Swanton Wrong on Gates Budget

You may recall that last year the New York State Comptroller's Office conducted a month's long audit of Gates town finances. The resulting report was critical and concluded that the increase in the Town's budget deficit was the result of poor fiscal management and failure to make "hard choices" (which as we know means raise taxes or cut services).

As a prequel to the Audit Report, the Comptroller also rushed out a critique of the proposed 2006 Town Budget. The analysis was that the budget was "flawed" and was off by about $1.1 million. Ms. Swanton, playing her usual Casandra role, immediately sought to gain political capital from the announcement, declaring at a Town Board meeting that based on the Controller's analysis, the Town would have a budget deficit of $4,000,000.00 by 2007.

Well, as we know, Alan Hevesi and Sue Swanton were wrong. Instead of losing another $1.1 million, the Town budget improved by about $600,000, leaving the deficit at about $2.2 million, not the $4 million Alan and Sue predicted.

Much has been made of the deficit and I can't really understand it. Obviously, in a perfect world, budgets are always "zeroed out" at the end of the budget year. We should never have surpluses or deficits. Reality leads to a different result.

Kodak's sale of the RTP property left us with a hole in our assessed valuation and our tax revenues. The Town Board considered its options. They rejected immediate service cuts or tax increases. They hoped that the new owners of the Tech Park could replace Kodak with new users and that the assessed value would make a comeback. To bridge the gap, the Board chose to use the surplus that had been built up prior to that time. It was akin to using your savings account to deal with the rainy day.

Unfortunately, the Tech Park did not come back fast enough. The surplus became a deficit and finally, the Board had no choice but to look for spending cuts and tax increases. You should note that the Town's employees bore the biggest burden of the cuts. Their pay was frozen and they began to pay an ever-increasing share of their health benefits. Their sacrifice allowed the Board to keep actual service cuts to a minimum. If you think Town employees are overpaid, you should think again; our Town employees are nowhere near the top in salary and benefits compared to other municipal employees.

Ms. Swanton and her Democrat colleagues keep complaining about the deficit and the "bad management" that allowed the deficit to arise. What they never do is tell us in a clear and straight-forward way what they would have done differently or what they would do differently now. Would they have raised taxes? Would they have cut services? Would they eliminate the Gates Police? Cut senior or youth recreation programs?

Oh, yeah, she would not accept the take home car and she would roll back Town Board salaries. That would save a few thousand dollars. Then what? Ms. Swanton once indicated that, if elected, she would serve without pay. To that I can only say, "you get what you pay for".