Council approves tax hike
After discussion, council agrees to cut recreation director to save $70K
TROY >> After an often-heated, twohour discussion, the Troy City Council at a pair of special Tuesday night meetings managed to trim only about $70,000 from the 2016 city budget before overwhelmingly approving the spending package.
After rejecting proposals that included cutting $50,000 earmarked for the city’s bicentennial celebration and $10,000 to pay for the council’s legislative assistant and eliminating a video clerk’s position in the city Police Department, the only cut made to Mayor Lou Rosamilia’s amended $68 million proposal the council approved was to eliminate the recreation director’s job. That estimated $71,379 savings led to a reduction in the final property tax increase from 4.97 percent to 4.625 percent.
Council members voted 8-1 in favor of the final plan during a five-minute meeting of the entire council that followed the muchlonger Finance Committee meeting. Other than the cut in the Recreation Department, which the council justified because of the upcoming consolidation of the department into a new city general
services department, the final plan was a compromise worked out between Rosamilia and the council after members refused to allow the city to exceed the state-mandated cap on property-tax increases for the mayor’s initial, $68.6 million
package. That plan called for a 9.3 percent tax hike.
Rosamilia has seven days to determine if he will veto the lone change to his final proposal, with the council having an additional seven days to try to override any veto. While he said Wednesday he has yet to make a determination, Rosamilia did express skepticism with the cut, saying he was uncertain if the new general services director would be able to effectively take on all the responsibilities of the recreation director, which he said includes supervising a staff of 17 full-time and nearly 100 part-time employees.
“Can this person who’s going to be hired oversee Recreation, oversee [the Department of Public Works] and oversee the code?” he asked.
While he said he did not prefer the budget plan approved by the council, Rosamilia said he also understood the reality of the process over the past several months.
“My feeling is that we still need a 9.3 percent tax increase,” he explained, “but in order to get the local law passed to allow us to go over the tax cap, we needed a compromise.”
As he did Monday night when the council reversed its earlier vote and agreed to override the tax cap for the deal worked out with the mayor, Councilman James Gordon, R-District 1, cast the lone dissenting vote Tuesday, saying the council was refusing to consider further cuts that could have lowered the tax increase below
the 1.2 percent allowed under the tax cap.
“We still have an opportunity to take a budget that exceeds the state tax cap and take it to where we want it to go,” he told council members.
But several council members said it was simply a last-minute ploy to undermine the deal negotiated with Rosamilia and leave the administration of Mayor-elect Patrick Madden to deal with the impact on city government.
“What the next administration will do is manage the budget of the city,” said Councilman Robert Doherty, D-District 4. “To bring this up tonight strikes me as not appropriate. It’s an invitation to the contentious dialog of an argument. It’s our responsibility now to pass this budget.”
Gordon angrily defended what he said was a long list of potential cuts he planned to introduce during the Finance Committee meeting that preceded the full council meeting.
“This is where a minority member of the City Council gets to voice his opinion,” said Gordon, who will leave the council at the end of the month after failing in his bid to succeed Rosamilia, who chose not to run for re-election. “It’s called democracy.”
Gordon dropped that effort soon after, however, once his proposal to cut the position in the Police Department was rejected.
“I’m going to abandon the rest of this because I know where it’s going to go and I’m not going to waste any more of our time,” he said.