Mayor may not get 16% raise
Schenectady budget review considering bigger tax cut
If there are two things that seem fairly certain for Friday’s budget review session, it’s that Mayor Gary Mccarthy will not get the 16 percent pay raise he wants, and city homeowners are likely to receive more than the .046 percent property tax cut presently on the table.
Those two topics and the proposed elimination of the job of longtime Fair Housing Coordinator Ahmad Yusufi — a topic that could be discussed in executive session — will likely dominate the debate when city council members gather to slash next year’s spending plan.
A budget adoption vote is set for Monday evening’s regular City
Council meeting.
“We’re looking at 2 percent, maybe 4 percent,” said City Council President Ed Kosiur earlier this week when asked about the mayor’s request to boost his yearly salary from $96,700 to $112,483.
On property taxes, Kosiur suggested at least a 1.5 percent decrease, which he said would mean chopping roughly $330,000 from the proposed $112 million budget Mccarthy presented to the governing body last month.
The tax levy — the amount to be raised by taxes — is $30.6 million, about
$175,000 less than in the 2019 fiscal plan.
City Councilwoman Leesa Perazzo said Thursday she would like to dig even deeper and see property taxes go down about 2.5 percent.
To get there, she will propose transferring $350,000 from the more than $13 million in the traditionally overbudgeted general fund, coupled with $130,000 apiece from the $7 million total surplus in the water and sewer funds.
“We’re sitting on $20 million of taxpayer money and I think we owe them some of that money back,” she said, noting that in crunching the numbers she factored in the ongoing police and fire contract negotiations and necessary water main work. “What I would like to strive for is an additional 2 percent over the .46 (percent) the mayor put forth.”
She and Councilman Vince Riggi said they have problems with the raise Mccarthy wants to give himself as well as other proposed boosts above 2 percent that the mayor has put in for his department heads.
As a result, both Riggi and Perazzo said they would support 2 percent cost of living raises for everyone.
Councilman John Polemeni, chair of the council’s
“We’re sitting on $20 million of taxpayer money and I think we owe them some of that money back.”
— Leesa Perazzo, City Councilwoman
finance committee, said Mccarthy “is not getting 16 percent.”
Mccarthy, a Democrat running unopposed on Election Day for a third four-year term, has previously defended his request by saying that he held off until now because the city was struggling financially, but is now in better shape.
Mccarthy retired after a nearly 30-year career as an investigator in the Schenectady County district attorney’s office. Since January 2012, he has been collecting a monthly gross pension of $5,297 in addition to his mayoral salary. Kosiur said he plans to push for an increase in the city’s minimum wage for entrylevel jobs to $13 an hour in 2020, and an additional dollar every year after that for the next two years as a way to get more blue-collar positions filled.
Kosiur, Riggi, Perazzo, and Polimeni are all seeking re-election.