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From Governing’s
Grading the Counties introductionFebruary 2002 issue
THE GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE PROJECT
Report Card:
In the late 1990s, this wasn’t much of a problem. Retail sales boomed and indirectly subsidized homeowners. The county’s property-tax levy fell from $128 million in 1994 to a delightfully low $48 million in 2001. But Suffolk was also growing more and more dependent on the sales tax to keep the system going, and this year, with the economy in decline, the property-tax rate had to go up by a painful 13 percent. Suffolk’s elected leaders justify this approach. “Even though you’re going to get short-term unrest with the voters,” argues Paul Tonna, presiding officer of the county’s legislature, “you get what’s really important — a stable budget.”
But it isn’t that simple. In most New York counties, the responsibility for property assessment lies with the counties’ towns, rather than the counties themselves. In Suffolk, this leads to an unusually inefficient means of revenue collection: The towns undervalue the most expensive homes and rarely reassess them for their true value. Homeowners routinely challenge the assessments, often win, and each year, the county has to return millions of dollars it badly needs to operate its government.
Meanwhile, police salary increases are threatening the county’s stable budget. Binding arbitration has been used as the primary bargaining tool — which is to say there’s almost no bargaining. The unions hold out for arbitration and consequently have seen their raises exceed the inflation rate as Suffolk’s and neighboring Nassau County’s pay scales leapfrog over each other. The county’s superior officers’ union won an arbitration award last year that cost Suffolk $5.6 million in raises for 2000 and 2001.
In light of these financial challenges, Suffolk is fortunate that its leaders have been debt-averse. The county adheres to strict rules for debt issuance and has a history of repaying its obligations as quickly as it can. Suffolk doesn’t borrow money for items with useful lives of less than five years, for those that cost less than $25,000 as a total purchase, or for those that individually cost less than $5,000. Expenditures that don’t qualify — such as road resurfacing and travel — get taken care of out of the general fund or not at all.
Positives: County required to put 25 percent of any discretionary fund balance into reserves, but used more than half of that reserve to balance 2002 budget; paying down accumulated debt quickly; adopted investment and debt policies; nonpartisan budget review office analyzes operating and capital budgets and prepares five-year impact statements on legislation; budget posted on Web and distributed to libraries, although no popular report included.
Negatives: No formal oversight body for investments or debt management; debt capacity analyses don’t include leases or certificates of participation; elimination of sales tax on clothing purchases cost county about $45 million in 2002; unit costing not conducted; no use of master contracts; little procurement training; no special purchasing authority in emergency cases; budget module of integrated financial system failed, so county still relies on stand-alone system.
Positives: Projects tracked formally at central and department level; most projects completed on time and on budget; active preventive-maintenance programs; zone supervisors examine roads monthly; value engineering has saved money; anecdotally, little maintenance backlog.
Negatives: Project reports lack detail; highway division doesn’t run automated project tracking; computerized inventory and condition-management systems don’t exist.
Positives: Centralization of personnel management has led to efficiencies; starting salaries increased for hard-to-fill positions; intensified college recruiting, especially for minorities in public safety jobs; mandatory training for new supervisors; assistants shared between departments to cut down on overtime; HR computer systems improved during past few years, although still not integrated; labor-management committee makes decisions regarding county health insurance plan.
Negatives: No centralized workforce planning; cumbersome process to eliminate job titles, so classifications are usually added rather than amended; tech employee job titles out of date; inconsistent performance-appraisal policies; no pay for performance; merit reward program failed; weak training programs for front-line employees; some union contracts, especially in law enforcement, can take years to negotiate.
Positives: None.
Negatives: County lacks any component of managing for results — no countywide strategic plan, strategic goals, performance reports or performance audits process; no measurement of outputs and outcomes; little appetite for performance information; citizen feedback lacking.
Positives: Good support for IT from county executive and legislature; steering committee represents executive, legislative, budget and IT offices and evaluates projects before implementation; good standards compliance.
Negatives: IT director reports to county civil service department; no IT strategic plan; too much duplication in departmental IT efforts; little formal analysis after system implementation; centralized project tracking not conducted; employees lack time to take advantage of training; little ability to conduct two-way transactions.
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hough Suffolk’s nearly one-and-a-half million people range from the oceanfront elite to middle-class and blue-collar suburbanites, they do tend to share one characteristic: a pronounced reluctance to tax themselves. In recent years, county politics has been defined largely by its unusual revenue law, one that forces the government to return any unexpected sales-tax proceeds to the voters in the form of property-tax cuts.