To the editor:

The “Volunteer Firefighter Enhanced Cancer Disability Benefits Act” was passed by the New York Legislature in June 2017 and signed by Gov. Cuomo in October. It provides any volunteer interior firefighter in New York state who happens to contract certain types of cancer during his or her firefighter service with cash benefits consisting of lump-sum payments and/or monthly allotments up to a lifetime total of $50,000.

The law states that all organizations using volunteer firefighters must, by January 2019, show proof of appropriate insurance coverage or an ability to otherwise pay for the law’s benefits. Note that the cost of funding this law falls entirely on local volunteer fire departments, who operate within New York’s 932 towns and 539 villages, and who in turn rely on their funding principally from those municipalities.

News of this law may come as a surprise to you. It appears that little or no effort was expended by our state legislators while considering the law to consult with our state’s volunteer fire departments, towns, villages or property taxpayers. Perhaps the reason for this stealthy behavior is that the law is an “unfunded mandate,” a form of New York state legislation that many of us believed had come to an end several years ago. In 2011 Gov. Cuomo appointed a blue-ribbon panel to make recommendations on ending unfunded mandates, which indeed they did. Nothing further happened.

You may wonder how much the law is going to cost town and village taxpayers. The answer is that nobody knows. Yes, the law was signed by Gov. Cuomo more than six months ago, but no one has yet figured out what it will cost. There is no historical data on which to base predictions of claims that will occur under a law like this. Why? Because there is no cause-and-effect requirement for making a claim — that is, if a firefighter develops cancer — there is no need to think that its cause had anything to do with firefighting activities. This is what makes costs under the law unknowable. As Clifford Goldstein of Chartwell Law puts it, “Unlike firefighter cancer presumption laws in other states, this new NY law does not even pretend to be evidence-based and does not purport to have any basis in epidemiology.”

Ironically, it appears that the law was “sold” to our state legislators as a cause-and-effect law. Even the prestigious New York Association of Towns recently informed me that the law is intended to help “volunteer firefighters who develop cancer due to their service.” Wrong. There is no “due to their service” language in the law.

And speaking of irony, presently there is a bill working in the New York Senate, S.8400, which is designed to alter our constitution to eliminate unfunded mandates once and for all.

The Cancer Disability Benefits Act should either be immediately rescinded or amended to provide full funding from the state.

John Quenell

Paul Smiths