Franklin County tax rates for 2017

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By township, per $1,000 of assessed property value

Brighton: $5.48

Franklin: $4.60

Harrietstown: $4.19

Tupper Lake: $4.60

Santa Clara: $4.60

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MALONE — Franklin County legislators adopted a 2017 budget Thursday that will increase the county property tax levy by just under one-and-a-half percent.

County leaders say their $103 million spending plan for next year could also help ease the county out of its “fiscally stressed” designation.

“We just turned the Titanic a tiny bit, and we’re going to start to head in the right direction,” said Legislator Barbara Rice, D-Saranac Lake, who chairs the legislature’s Finance Committee.

The amount of the 2017 budget to be raised by taxes will be $16,343,323, an increase of 1.47 percent, or $236,245 over the current tax levy. The average tax rate in the county will be $4.83 per $1,000 of assessed property value, although the rates will vary depending on the township.

The county plans to use $1.5 million in fund balance to offset the tax levy.

Before the budget was adopted, Legislator Paul Maroun, R-Tupper Lake, asked why the projected revenue from sales tax wasn’t increased next year, considering the county is on pace to exceed its sales tax revenue forecast for this year.

“We understand where it’s heading for this year, but I felt it was in our best interest because we want to build our fund balance,” said county Treasurer Bryon Varin. “I think it’s really important because we staved off having to borrow this year, and I think this budget is going to help stave off (borrowing) again. I think it’s going to help our bottom line.”

If there’s a surplus from sales tax revenue at the end of the year, those funds can be used to cover expenditures that have exceeded the budget, Varin said.

Legislators heaped praise on county Manager Donna Kissane, Varin and the other county officials who crafted the budget.

“I want to thank everybody that worked on this,” Maroun said. “I read in the paper that one county next to us said they were the proudest or had the best budget around. For a small county that doesn’t have the kind of business that Clinton County has, or Essex (County), (a tax levy increase of) 1.47 (percent) is remarkable with all the issues we have going on in this county.”

Legislative Chairman Billy Jones, D-Chateaugay called it a “responsible” budget for county taxpayers.

“We’re not cutting any constituent services out of this, which is something we can be proud of,” he said. “It was a great team effort, and everybody worked hard at this. It didn’t just happen in the last two weeks or the last month. This is an ongoing process throughout the year to get us to this number. It is responsible, and we will be putting money into the fund balance appropriately also, which is important to us here in Franklin County.”

Rice said after the meeting that Kissane went through “every single solitary number” in the budget with the county’s department heads.

“This is not an unusual thing, but previously there had been quite a bit of fluff in the budget,” Rice said. “People worry about ‘What if. What if?’ and they built that into their budgets. What she did essentially is to work with them to eliminate that and put that into the contingency fund. If somebody runs short for some reason, the contingency is there for those kinds of emergencies.”

In a separate resolution Thursday, the county amended the current budget to reflect a $2.6 million payment of Intergovernmental Transfer Funds that’s expected to arrive today. The money includes state reimbursements for operating the county nursing home, which was sold last year to Alice Hyde Medical Center.

Rice said the county had banked on that money in the 2015 budget but didn’t get it.

“Not only did we have to cover it, we kept the nursing home open months longer than was expected because Alice Hyde wasn’t ready, so we had that added expense,” Rice said. “In addition to that, we had a $1 million payment to Alice Hyde. That was tough for us. We were on target to move forward and build our fund balance in 2015 but that kind of cut us out.”

Earlier this year, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released his annual list of fiscally stressed local governments. For the fourth year in a row, Franklin County received the highest designation, “significant fiscal stress,” based on a series of financial indicators including fund balance, cash-on-hand and patterns of operating deficits.

Rice said she thinks some of the steps the county took with the 2017 budget, like increasing fund balance, and other measures, like doing more long-term planning for infrastructure upgrades, could help shed the county’s fiscal stress label.

“Moving forward, of course we want to get off that list,” she said. “We’re focusing on doing that.”