Suffolk's painful budget choices
The budget battle is now fully joined. Today, the Suffolk County Legislature will vote on its own 2012 budget, amending the one that County Executive Steve Levy submitted. The lawmakers called Levy's the worst they had ever seen. Now he calls theirs the worst legislative budget he's ever seen. Very soon, Steve Bellone, the newly elected county executive, has to begin focusing on it intensely.
The most important points about the legislative budget are these:
It is unusually and admirably bipartisan. Presiding Officer William Lindsay (D-Holbrook) and the minority leader, Legis. John M. Kennedy Jr. (R-Nesconset), have worked closely in putting it together. They and their members agree with the assessment of the legislature's nonpartisan budget review staff that Levy's budget is $135 million out of balance -- despite his protestations to the contrary.
It does what the leaders said they'd do, solve the imbalance with a three-legged stool approach: cost savings, one-shot revenues and recurring revenues. The headline recurring revenue is a $12-million-plus increase in the tax levied for the police district in the five western towns. The budget also gets revenue from fees on items as small as use of county marinas and as painful -- though long overdue, after two decades -- as a 50-cent increase in bus fares, from $1.50 to $2.
The legislative budget includes some savings, such as consolidation of departments, deeper cuts than Levy proposed to contract agencies that provide a variety of services, and ending EPIC, Elderly Pharmaceutical Insurance Coverage.
It lays off 88 employees, mostly connected with the consolidation, but postpones until next year the question of further layoffs. Levy insists that his budget was balanced -- if legislators had gone along with the hundreds more layoffs he proposed. But they felt that would have gutted county services. So their budget funds those positions for the first six months of 2012 and leaves the rest up to Bellone.
It uses one-shot revenues, such as borrowing more against the revenue from a 1998 settlement with tobacco companies and dipping further into the tax stabilization reserve fund. One-shots are always problematic, but tough times call for unorthodox responses.
In other words, the budget situation isn't pretty, and it's going to get uglier. Levy says he'll veto much of what the legislature passes today, and lawmakers are likely to override him. Then it's up to the incoming county executive to work hard to get the needed union concessions -- using the argument that the legislature took painful steps such as tax and fee increases, layoffs and cost-cutting, and now it's up to the unions to do their share, to avoid more layoffs.
For now, this much is clear: The legislative budget steers the county toward a smaller payroll and reduced services. It's also clear that Levy won't be around next year to deal with whatever budget emerges from this process. Most of the legislators voting today will be back, in harness with the new executive. So, in all the back-and-forth over whose budget is truly balanced, the legislators deserve some benefit of the doubt. After all, they'll have to live with it.