Counties balk at paying for prosecutors’ raises
County leaders and district attorneys urged passage of a bill Tuesday to have the state pick up the cost of a mandated pay raise for prosecutors, a standard practice for decades that Gov. Andrew Cuomo discontinued.
Rensselaer County Executive Kathy Jimino said the cost of the current pay hike to her county is $30,000.
“While that may not sound like a lot of money, it’s $30,000 that we will have to take away from some other program that is not already managed by the state,” she said. “Do we reduce our senior lunches? Do we take less of our veterans to their medical appointments? Do we pave (fewer) roads?”
Jimino added that the unfunded mandate is “emblematic of a much-larger problem, that is that the state decides they want a particular program, they want money spent in a particular way and they point at counties and say, ‘And you will pay for this,”
In Rensselaer County, 89 cents of every tax dollar collected by the county goes to pay for state-mandated programs, according to Jimino.
Said Stephen Acquario of the New York State Association of Counties, “Would the state of New York like the president or the U.S. Congress to have the U.S. attorneys get paid for by the state of New York with the federal government telling them how much the states should pay? That’s happening in New York right now. The state of New York is telling the counties here, local taxpayers, thou shalt pay a certain amount of salary without coming up with a corresponding amount of money.&”
He said it was a small issue for larger counties, but a concern to the majority of New York counties that are rural. “Forty-five of these New York counties are struggling to include this salary increase in their budgets,” he said. “It’s a third of their property tax allowable growth while we have a lot of needs to fund here locally.”
Acquario was referring to Cuomo’s tax cap, one of his signature achievements as governor, which has curbed large annual local property tax increases by making it harder to simply hike spending and corresponding tax rates. The cap is squeezing some local governments faced with increasing costs from statemandated programs. The bill for a state pickup of the pay increase has passed the Senate, but remains stalled for now in the Assembly.
Legislators are pushing toward a June 21 adjournment, and the New York State Association of Counties and the District Attorney’s Association of New York are urging a vote on the bill before then. District attorneys are county employees and were granted pay raises approved by Cuomo and the Legislature as part of a 2016-17 state budget plan that also hiked the pay of judges.
A similar plan was in place to hike the pay of the governor and legislators, but that stalled in December amid bickering between legislative leaders and Cuomo.
“For 50 years, every time the state has increased judges’ pay, they have funded DAs’ salary increases in the form of reimbursement to counties,” the state Association of Counties said in a release. “But this year, and last, the state budgets did not include allocations for DA salary increases, opting instead to have local taxpayers fund the state-mandated raise.”
The total cost of a district attorney raises was put at $1.6 million a year, a minuscule fraction of the $163 billion state budget. Overall, district attorneys were paid $8.9 million in 2015. That is due to rise to $11 million by 2018. Salaries for county district attorneys varied widely in 2015 before the new law took effect.
By 2018, most upstate DAs will be paid $193,000. The pay will be $203,000 in Erie, Monroe and several downstate counties. The pay was increased to put district attorneys nearly at par with judges.