An additional $135 million in funding was secured in the newly passed state budget to help upstate and western New York cities balance their local budgets, and alleviate budget shortfalls that were “decimating public services.”
Rochester, Albany, and Syracuse are receiving $20 million each.
Buffalo will receive $25 million.
“Many of them have seen a loss of federal dollars and federal support,” said Gov. Kathy Hochul. “We helped cities all across Upstate New York and talked to them about the size of their budgets and have given them a percentage which will help them mitigate the need to raise taxes or cut services like public safety.”
Changes to the Tier 6 pension plan for more than 830,000 public employees hired after April 2012 included in the state budget is anticipated to take a bite out of this funding.
“The County Government Association as well as the New York State Conference of Mayors has made it clear that if the state is going to make this change to Tier 6, they need to make sure they provide the requisite compensation for localities if they’re going to expect us to fund Tier 6,” said Rochester Mayor Malik Evans.
The New York State Association of Counties told Spectrum News it’s “good” that the “original Tier 6 proposal was scaled down.”
“Certainly, a mid-year cost shift like that when the existing costs for pensions were rising almost $200 million dollars alone to absorb another $200 million dollars on top of that was simply unaffordable,” said Stephen Acquario, executive director of the New York State Association of Counties.
Both Evans and Acquario say the fiscal impact remains to be seen since “pension rates tend to lag,” but the estimated impact could be somewhere “in the ballpark of $50-$55 million across the state’s 57 counties.”