Another Boring Budget Cycle

Everyone likes to complain about taxes. It is one of the great underrated spectator sports. But few people do anything about taxes. Very, very few people take the time to study a budget. Budgets are dull, confusing and require a couple of hours to understand. Those who read a budget figure out pretty quickly that there is not much discretionary spending. Their money is being spent on jobs and people, real live breathing people, people who live in their own Village, and generally they don’t have the stomach to propose firing their neighbors or taking away their pensions. So Village taxes go up year after year at 2x to 3x the rate of inflation. Someday the tax burden will reach the tipping point and society will go into decline like the Roman or Byzantine Empires in their respective sunsets. But until then as a former mayor of Dobbs Ferry once told me, no one ever called him and asked him to cut a service or someone’s job.

 

So complaining about taxes is just blowing off steam. A good reason to talk loudly while having a hearty drink. Any serious politician will give lip service to cutting taxes but never do anything, except Rudy Guiliani, of course, who claims that he required each department head to cut costs each year he was in office. Such an idea is preposterous in Dobbs Ferry where simple crossing guards are required to carry petitions.

 

The other problem with budgets is that they are not entertaining. A witty budget is as rare as a good actuarial joke. Heard one lately? Budgets are dry affairs that don’t generate belly laughs. God knows I can’t find anyone who wants to go down to the Celtic Corner for a good pint and a walk through the line items.

 

The 2007 – 2008 budget for Village of Dobbs Ferry was released last week — snooze. It called for spending of $14,882,108 — yawn. That equals about 2.3% of the gross income of Dobbs Ferry’s residents; estimated at $650,000,000 based on an extrapolation of the latest data available from the IRS — snore. The Village is required by law to have a balanced operating budget so the property tax rate will increase by 7.55% — yikes. This compares to 6.5% last year – gulp!

 

Curiously, the assessed value of property in Dobbs Ferry has been flat for the last five years at between $53 million and $54 million – even though property values have boomed during the same period – the rich get richer. Clearly, Westchester County needs to reform the way property is assessed so that values are more in line with realty – don’t worry IBM will block it.

 

For those of you unfamiliar with Westchester County, New York, it is famous for its large and diverse group of tax collectors. Residents of Dobbs Ferry have the privilege of paying nine layers of tax. [Marginal tax rates based on average income of $131,000.]

 

Federal – 28%

State – 6.85%

County Property – 1.2%

County Refuse District – 0.1%

County/Village Sales – 6.25% of non-food purchases or about 2.5% of gross income

Town – 0.1%

North Yonkers Sewer District – 0.2%

Village – 2.3%

School District – 5.4%

 

Total – 47% of gross income

 

In this context, the Village tax burden isn’t really that significant. But as an old friend used to say, “that’s how you get nibbled to death by ducks”.

 

The Village provides a wide range of services for its 2.3% of gross income: 

 

1. General government

2. Public Safely

3. Transportation

4. Parks and Recreation

5. Home and Community Services

6. Library.

 

This is an impressive list of services, and the service delivery is excellent. But I can’t afford it anymore !

 

 

 The only way to cut taxes in Dobbs Ferry is to cut Village employment. The Village has about 75 employees who make $30,000 per year or more and about 200 people who work in various part-time or in voluntary positions.

 

To its credit the Village staff does not include much fat, — at least compared to other local governments.

 

Unfortunately, the only place in the budget to cut a significant number of jobs (and the really expensive benefits that come with those jobs) is to cut the police force. Nothing is more popular that firing cops in a small town. A sure fire way to lose an election.

 

The other time bomb in the Village budget is the new Department of Public Works building. Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away someone decided to build this facility / garage in a very weird place. I affectionately call it the Quarry because of the amount of rock that has been removed. Apparently, this $5.6 million garage is so over-budget that they have had to eliminate the windows and skip the construction of offices for key personnel. But then again the Dobbs Ferry Party specializes in costs overruns and badly conceived projects. The DPW will haunt Dobbs Ferrians for years to come as the interest and principal payments kick in. 

 

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Don’t read on unless you are one of those people who jog around Halsey Pond or up and down the Aqueduct thinking adrenaline induced, visionary thoughts that have no way of turning into reality. But are convinced that twenty years from now people will look back and say, “My God, how clairvoyant?, too bad he or she had no social skills and couldn’t get anything done.”

 

 

One way to fire cops and their nasty benefit packages is to use technology for public surveillance rather than people. Dobbs Ferry spends about $4,425,097 including benefits on police surveillance / protection or about $1,079 per household. The Village employs 29.4 full-time equivalents in law enforcement. This level of spending and employment is largely due to the out-of-date practice of sending cop cars up and down the hills of Dobbs Ferry looking for crimes in progress. Using cops in patrol cars for surveillance is not particularly practical. The chance of spotting or hearing a crime from an air conditioned cruiser with tinted windows is pretty farfetched so they are just tool around wasting time and fuel and causing traffic and pollution. Plus they look extremely bored, the poor souls. 

 

Since there are less than ten ways to enter and leave Dobbs Ferry by car, wouldn’t it be better to put up ten video cameras and then we would have a visual record of everyone coming and going in town and could spot the odd criminal making his or her getaway. We could then post the videos on YouTube and use the power of the Internet and bounty hunters to find the perpetrators. This would free up the remaining cops to do what they are trained for – intervention and enforcing the rights of pedestrians and cyclists. Some pot-smokers libertarians will oppose video surveillance because it can be abused for political purposes, but those Ludites need to get with the program and move into the 21^st Century. Remember the basic structure of the modern police force was invented by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750.

 

 

Another way to cut spending in Dobbs Ferry is to wean the Village and its inhabitants off of their ever-expanding fleet of cars, vans, trucks, SUV’s, buses, street sweepers and backhoes. Dobbs Ferry will spend $1,300,000 in fiscal 2007-2008 on its roads and their upkeep, not counting the interest and principal repayments for the new DWP. On the other hand, it will spend a trifling $180,000 on pedestrians and sidewalks (mostly for those beloved crossing guards who carry the petitions).  Right now, a lot of kids, students, maids, gardeners, caddies, joggers, and walkers have to use the street to get to and from school or work or just to get some exercise. It is time to bring some balance back into the equation and give walking, jogging and biking equal funding with riding. Better and more sidewalks will cut traffic, pollution, while increasing health and everyone’s general mood. Who ever heard of an incident of sidewalk rage !.

 

 

Instead of just managing streets and the cops on the beat, Dobbs Ferry needs to start managing is renewal resources, primarily for cash. Accordingly to Jared Diamond, the UCLA anthropologist, societies that manage their environment, especially their wild food sources, tend to survive longer than societies that waste these resources.

 

Dobbs Ferry will spend nothing on environmental management in 2007- 2008. 

 

Wild Life Management — Face it, the suburbs are turning into an unsupervised wild life preserve. It is time for the Village to license hunters or trappers to cull the herd and mandate that the meat be processed by local artisans into gourmet sausages and pates. Who needs prosciutto from Parma when you can get dry venison sausage from Dobbs?   

 

Fisheries – The Village has plenty of ponds that could be managed to produce fish that could be sold by local merchants and restaurants.

 

Mollusks – If you want to clear up the Hudson River, the quickest way to do it is to reintroduce mollusks who feed through filtration. The mud flats off Wicker’s Creek would be a good place to start. Dobbs Ferry oysters would  once again be as famous as they were in the 1800’s.

 

Water – Dobbs Ferry has plenty of water resources that flow unexploited into the Hudson; the Village imports its water from upstate New York and pays a French company for the privilege. Ground or well water could be used for drinking (reinserted into the gird), while surface water could be used for energy. As crazy as it sounds, Dobbs Ferry has enough surface water and elevation to generate some of its own electricity.

 

Silvaculture – Silvaculture is the growing of trees as field crops. Really successful cultures practice silvastructure – Japan, Germany, Papua-New Guinea. The Village government should provide the infrastructure to plant and harvest trees as a way of creating sustainable ecological value. The trees could be harvested for lumber or energy/biofuel depending on relative market value. Some tree might also be planted for their food value to humans and/or wild life. Trees are a great carbon sink and would help in a small way to dampen global warming. The residents of Dobbs Ferry might be surprised how much value they can create for themselves and the Village, just by growing shade trees in their manicured yards.

 

Remember that every $140,000 lowers taxes by 1% so lots of little things can add up to a vast improvement in the rate of increase in the tax assessment.

 

Though these ideas may appear to be too far out of the box to be taken seriously by an electable politician, the Trustees of Dobbs Ferry need to look at the budget that they are about to approve and see if they can find some ways to move the Village into the 21^st Century. Keeping the tax rate to its historical level of less than 2% of gross income is a noble, if really boring, goal.

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Advice to the Trustees of Dobbs Ferry

 

“Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them for no one can fix on me that which is ugly nor can I be angry with my kinsman nor hate him.  For we are made for co-operation like feet, like hands, like eyelids like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.” 

 

Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, AD 121 – 180.