A Missed Opportunity on Mandate Relief

By Tom O'Mara, NYS Senator District 58 (Chemung, Schuyler, Steuben, Tompkins, and Yates Counties)

NYSAC’s “2022 Key County Priorities” agenda gets right to the point on a critical and yet continually overlooked battleground for New York State’s future: the need to truly remake the state-local partnership.

They write, “Nearly 10 years ago, New York State mandated that local governments adhere to a property tax cap of two percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower. At the time, the state promised a robust package of mandate reforms that would help local governments stay under the tax cap. While state leaders did cap county Medicaid costs and implement a new pension tier to slow the growth in state mandated costs, dozens more mandates were not addressed.”

It is a battle I’ve been fighting for years and have been outspoken about the fact that New York has not lived up to then-Governor Cuomo’s original promise in 2011 to lift the existing burden of unfunded state mandates.

While it turned out mandate relief wasn’t the only promise he wouldn’t keep, it has been one of the most damaging. Though the property tax cap has provided badly needed relief to taxpayers, lack of a deep-rooted commitment to addressing unfunded state mandates is ultimately responsible for New York’s outrageous property tax burden. Comprehensive mandate relief remains needed if we ever hope to deliver a future of property tax cuts for local taxpayers.

NYSAC makes it clear that Governor Hochul includes initiatives in her proposed budget that are overdue and welcome -- and I fully agree!

Yet the fact remains that long-term property tax relief is not made a priority in what is going to be the largest budget in New York State’s history.

The flashy rollout of a proposed property tax rebate program that will only deliver a one-time benefit to property taxpayers doesn’t cut it, in my view.There are more effective ways to address the property tax burden. For starters? Mandate relief.

It’s a missed opportunity in a budget plan that Governor Hochul touts, at its core, as being all about seizing opportunities. Let’s be straightforward: Relieving counties of the burden of unfunded state mandates is the only way to ensure a future for local property taxpayers defined by property tax cuts, not just a slower rate of property tax growth.

Governor Hochul’s proposed budget, for example, provides no significant moves on a priority that I have long advocated, which is to finally relieve counties of the local share of the cost of Medicaid. It is the single most needed action in this arena.

As the NYSAC agenda reminds us: the $7.6 billion that New York’s counties are mandated to pay the state for Medicaid is more “than all the remaining counties in the country combined” and, furthermore, it is more than most states pay in nonfederal match for Medicaid.

I wrote recently that I have never heard a governor so free and easy with the use of the word “billions” as Governor Hochul was when presenting her proposed 2022-2023 executive budget.

“Billions” is now the defining word of the New York State budget. When all is said and done after the legislative majorities get involved, it will come in at something approaching $220 billion and jumpstart New York into the stratosphere of state budgets now and well into the future.

It is a direction that should jolt state and local taxpayers too.

Is Governor Hochul’s direction sustainable, by any stretch of the imagination, for current and future taxpayers? Does it pinpoint the right priorities for the long-term benefit of taxpayers at a time when we face the best opportunity we may ever have to do just that?

New York remains one of the highest-taxed states in America, and one of the most overregulated. Local governments and property taxpayers foot the bill for one of the nation’s heaviest burdens of unfunded state mandates.

It is troubling that the governor and top legislative Democrats keep talking about higher and higher state government spending at a time when the priority should be a long-term, steady, sustainable future for upstate, middle-class communities, families, workers, and taxpayers.