Staff reductions, as well as other personnel cost-cutting measures, are inevitable as Southampton Town leaders prepare to slash some $5 million in spending from next year’s budget, Supervisor Anna Throne-Holst said this week.
Ms. Throne-Holst, who is due to present a tentative budget on September 30, said she did not yet have final figures on how many positions would need to be cut, but said that her budget would include staff reductions. The supervisor said she’s looking at a “combination of things”—staff cuts could go hand in hand with other measures, like mandating furloughs for all town employees, meaning staff could be required to take a certain number of days or hours off from work without getting paid. Other options could include freezes in salary increases, step increases and longevity pay. Higher-paid veteran police officers might be forced to retire in favor of lower-paid entry-level officers.
“Am I going to present a balanced budget on the 30th? You bet,” she said on Tuesday. “Whatever it takes to get there, I’ll get there, because I’m not going to put out a budget that is not structurally balanced or has unreal revenue projections.”
One furlough day—during which all the town’s administrative and CSEA staff would be required to take an unpaid day off; public safety personnel, like police officers, would be excluded—would save the town $100,000, she noted, adding, “The beauty of furloughs is it would affect everyone equally.”
This year’s budget season is largely impacted by a new New York State-mandated 2-percent tax levy cap, which limits the amount the town can collect in property taxes. At the same time, though, town officials have argued that fixed and contractual costs, like health care and pension contributions, have skyrocketed. Earlier this year, town officials were estimating that they needed to cut somewhere between $4 million and $5 million from next year’s budget, but new figures from the state on pension contribution costs for police have gone up “astronomically,” Ms. Throne-Holst said, bringing the number up to the higher end of the estimate.
“You don’t want to be sitting in my seat right now, I can tell you that,” she said.
Ms. Throne-Holst said she’s already reached out to the town’s two largest unions—the Civil Service Employees Association and the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association—in an attempt to negotiate concessions. But those conversations have not yet resulted in any progress. “It’s hard to say at this point,” Ms. Throne-Holst said. “It certainly hasn’t gone as swimmingly as I hoped. But these are complicated discussions and, again, I think there’s an understanding that what we’re asking for isn’t unreasonable. We have no places to go except to cut staff.”
In order for discussions to move along with the CSEA, the town must first agree to extend the union’s current contract—which calls for 2-percent annual raises for all union members—for at least one additional year, through 2014, according to CSEA President Pete Collins. The contract is set to expire at the end of 2013.
According to Ms. Throne-Holst, the PBA has asked that anything that is given up in the current contract be deferred and paid out in the future. PBA President Tim O’Flaherty did not return a call seeking comment this week.
“All I’m telling you at this point in time is that until they tell me that they will extend our contract, I cannot—I cannot—open up the CSEA contract,” Ms. Collins said.
Both unions are asking for things that Ms. Throne-Holst said she doesn’t believe she or the Town Board will agree with. “I don’t think we can kick this can down the road for future tax bills,” she said.
Firm numbers on how many furlough days, or how many staff members could be cut, are hard to quantify at this point, Ms. Throne-Holst said, as much is in flux, and there are other factors at play that could tweak the numbers.
Ms. Throne-Holst said she is also considering taking advantage of a town law that allows the municipality to force police officers to retire if they have served 20 years or more in the department. “In other words, every year we have to look at the roster of police officers that have been here for more than 20 years and reappoint them to that post,” she said. “So we have the option of not doing that. In other words, writing them out of the budget.”
She said that 20 police officers currently would be subject to the forced retirement, and their salary savings alone would be in range of $3 million to $4 million—though she stressed that the town would not force all 20 officers to retire. She said the town could fill any of those positions with new, entry-level officers at a lower cost.
The supervisor said that in formulating the budget, she’s striving for it to result in no increase in property taxes, but at the same time, she said, the cuts would come from an already “very, very bare-bones budget.”
Town Councilwoman Bridget Fleming said she’s in favor of doing a townwide analysis of positions to see which ones are filling an essential role in town government. She said she’d like the analysis to be independent of political affiliation.
“I am supportive of Anna’s approach overall in terms of finding efforts and reorganizing and the effect that that would have on staffing ... but I would like to see an analysis done, without consideration for political affiliation, if an individual is filling a role that needs to be filled, and secondly are they doing it well,” Ms. Fleming said.
Southampton Town Councilman Chris Nuzzi said that in conversations he’s had with Ms. Throne-Holst regarding the budget proposal, they have been on the same page when considering cutting staff and imposing furloughs and freezes to salaries, step increases and longevity. He added that those concepts were discussed in last year’s budget as well, but never implemented.
“I think all of those things could very well be real and necessary, with the understanding that there are essential services that the town has to provide that we need to continue to provide,” he said “But I do believe we can do so even after absorbing additional cuts.”
In this financial climate, he said, it’s imperative for government to cut back.
“The message that begins in village halls and town halls should carry all the way on down to Washington that now’s the time to do more with less,” he said, “just as every resident taxpayer, every business owner, has been doing over the past several years.”
Rohma Abbas on Sep 21, 2011