Legislature’s Administrative Services Committee meets (September 19, 2022)

A cybersecurity protection service program provided by New York State could save Chautauqua County over $88,000.

Chief Information Officer Jon DeAngelo, in a presentation to the Legislature’s Administrative Services Committee, said the state is offering endpoint protection for computers, “It’s virus protection, is basically what it is. They haven’t done this before. There’s additional services that they’re offering as well. It’s through a third party provider called CrowdStrike. So the state is offering it to all the counties at no cost for three years. We currently use a different product, so this would be a change for us. But this product would cover about, approximately 1,500 devices utilized by all county employees.”

DeAngelo said the IT Department is still evaluating whether it will go with the state’s program, but wanted to have the approval to move forward. He said the annual savings would be $29,460 if the County made the changeover. The Administrative Services approved the resolution unanimously.

The committee also voted to accept a grant from the State Board of Elections in the amount of $31,654 to offset expenses for return pre-paid postage.

County Board of Elections representative Donna Sanderson said the pre-paid postage is part of a new election law approved in April, “The grant will be in effect from July 1st, which then would cover our additional election that we had this year, which was the special and the primary in August. Going forward, the Board of Elections would have to provide a postage paid envelope to all voters who are requesting an application and an absentee ballot.”

Sanderson said the grant amount will cover all election costs for 2022 and expires at the end of this year. She said it also can be used to bring in two temporary employees to assist with mailing for the general election.

Administrative Services also approved a resolution selling a parcel of land in the town of Ellicott that had gone into foreclosure to Target Corporation. County Attorney Stephen Abdella said the small parcel of land is located at the entrance of the parking lot to the future store. He said the sale will put the property back on the tax rolls while eliminating any confusion over who is responsible for its maintenance. The committee approved the measure on the contingency that the financial information on the sale will be available for review at the Audit and Control Committee meeting on Thursday.

All approved resolutions will appear before the full County Legislature for consideration next week Wednesday, September 28.

A resolution filed by the four Democrats on the Legislature would set a fixed rate per gallon of 12-cents versus the current percentage of 4%. Concern was raised in both the Administrative Services and Audit & Control Committees about how the change in the tax would affect not just the county’s budget but local municipalities’ budget where sales tax revenue was concerned.

Finance Director Kitty Crow stated at both legislative committee meetings that she estimates the 12-cents per gallon fixed rate would result in the county meeting budgeted sales tax revenue figures for 2022.

County Executive PJ Wendel said the County Legislature instituted a “motor tax fuel holiday” in 2004, but that prices at the pump never actually went down. He said the same could happen this time too, “You should see a 36-cent drop per gallon as of June 1. What happens if you don’t? We have no control over that. The distributors, the retailers, they could say, ‘You’re going to give up the revenue? We’re not!’ An argument could say, ‘You raised your prices!’ ‘No, my prices were the same in June as they were in March. The only difference is my price hasn’t changed. I just didn’t lowered it in compensation for the tax rate reduction that state or county has.'”

The County Legislature’s meeting starts at 6:30 p.m. in the Legislative Chambers of the Gerace Office Building in Mayville. It is open to the public and is available through a livestream as well.

Jamestown Community College President Dr. Daniel DeMarte presents to Chautauqua County Legislature’s Audit & Control Committee (April 21, 2022)

Jamestown Community College President Dr. Daniel DeMarte made an initial ask for nearly $1.3 million for projects at the college before the County Legislature’s Audit & Control Committee.

DeMarte said a formal request will be coming before the County Planning Board later this year for two on-going projects and one new one.

The first project request for $53,000 is to finish the last phase of construction at the Scharmann Theatre to bring it into compliance with an Office of Civil Rights issue. Once that work is completed, the college will be able to re-open the theatre. The total cost of that project is $212,000. The second request would be $250,000 to install LED lighting on the Jamestown campus. The third and largest request is for almost $1 million, DeMarte said, to put turf down on the soccer field, “I can’t compete with Corning and other schools down the road if we don’t have the facilities to attract those students to JCC. They want to come. They want to be here. They like it here. They want to stay here. But we’re at a point where I simply cannot compete with our neighboring institutions if we don’t start making some improvements with the facilities and it starts with turfing the soccer field.”

The total cost for that project would be nearly $4 million.

DeMarte also discussed with legislators that in regards to the college’s two north county facilities, he’s not sure if that’s the best location for JCC to be. He said they are working on adding programming this Fall in Dunkirk similar to what’s offered at the Manufacturing Technical Institute in Jamestown, “What we offer there now is essentially the first year of the two-year transfer degree. We don’t offer any CTE programming in Dunkirk. I think that perhaps there’s a void. You know I often hear, as I’m sure you do too, that there are people who will not travel over the great divide, over the hill in Cassadaga into Jamestown, for an education at JCC.”

DeMarte said CTE training also will be offered this Fall in Dunkirk. He said the college is working on a new memorandum of understanding with the Job Corp in Cassadaga for them to have students go to both Jamestown and Dunkirk for CTE training.

DeMarte said the number of out of area students coming to JCC has helped offset the decrease in students from local high schools. He said they’re setting enrollment and recruitment goals at the pre-pandemic 2019 levels, “In that year we stopped a nine-year decline. So we’ve been sliding in enrollment for nine years. Not unusual. Most colleges in the country have been sliding. We stopped that in ’19. So our immediate goal is to get back to where we were in ’19 and then determine where we can go from there. We don’t anticipate that there will be much growth, but some stability.”

DeMarte said the college is working on workforce development, including creating a water treatment training program two years ago. He said the next closest location for this training is in Morrisville, New York, “We’ve trained over 300 individuals locally in water treatment. We’re now looking at wastewater treatment training because that need is there also. This one program has been so successful that we’re not being asked to come into other counties to help deliver the training which poses other challenges for us but that’s a good problem to have. So we’ve been asked recently if we’d take the training to Niagara County and help begin to train their municipalities in water treatment.”

DeMarte said in an effort to get students back to campus, they offered one free on-campus class to high school juniors and seniors. The goal was to get 60 students to take part and 100 students signed up before the program was even marketed. He said the same program will be run this summer and 90 students have already signed up for the 150 spots available.

DeMarte added that there was no good news in the state budget for community colleges. He said that community colleges fared worse in the 2022-23 budget than they had in the previous three state budgets.

County Attorney Stephen Abdella and Finance Director Kitty Crow address Audit & Control Committee (April 21, 2022)

Democratic Chautauqua County Legislators are expected to pre-file a resolution Friday morning to alleviate the sales tax on gas in the county.

County Attorney Stephen Abdella informed the Legislature’s Audit and Control Committee that he had been contacted by Legislators Susan Parker, Bob Bankowski, Paul Whitford, and Billy Torres. Their resolution that would be on Wednesday’s full County Legislature agenda would opts for the fixed sales tax rate of 12-cents per gallon. Abdella said they had not set a sunset date for the resolution but were considering March 1.

Finance Director Kitty Crow said the county should still meet budgeted sales tax projections with the proposed 12-cents per gallon rate resolution, “So we wouldn’t expect a surplus and we wouldn’t expect a deficit. You know, I think that that would result in us coming in at budget.”

Crow said sales tax from motor fuel sales typically account for about 6% of the budgeted sales tax revenues.

No legislators from Audit and Control offered to co-sponsor the resolution, citing the need to gather more information about how it could affect local municipalities’ budgets. County Executive PJ Wendel said he had directed county staff to reach out to local municipalities to see if that information could be gathered before Wednesday night’s meeting.

County Attorney Stephen Abdella and County Finance Director Kitty Crow address Administrative Services Committee on April 18, 2022

County legislators heard initial proposals for how they could give consumers a break on gasoline sales tax.

County Attorney Stephen Abdella and County Finance Director Kitty Crow presented to the Administrative Services Committee on the proposals.

Abdella said while the state doesn’t allow counties to entirely suspend sales tax on motor fuel, Chautauqua County could suspend the 4-percent sales tax rate or a fixed amount per gallon rate such as 8-cents, 12-cents, or 16 cents a gallon.

He said if the county chooses a fixed-rate per gallon, there is a proviso by the state to adjust the fixed rate if the price of gasoline drops below what the sales tax percentage rate would be versus the fixed rate per gallon, “If we were to set a fixed rate of 16-cents which is roughly based on $4 a gallon, and when I say roughly it’s because if the price at the pump is $4 our tax is not on the full $4 because part of that $4 is a state and federal tax and our tax is not applied as a tax on a tax.”

He said at $4 a gallon for gas, the county receives 14.8 cents on a gallon and not 16-cents.

Crow recommended going with the fixed rate of $12-cents per gallon option as they estimate the county would still meet budget projections for sales tax, thus not hurting municipalities in their budgeted sales tax revenue figures, but still giving consumers a break on the cost of gas.

The Administrative Services committee opted not to create a resolution on the matter given that the Audit & Control Committee also will hear this presentation at its meeting at 8:35 a.m. on Thursday, April 21st.

Abdella said a resolution would need to be pre-filed by 10:00 a.m. this Friday in order to appear on the Legislature‘s voting agenda for April 27. He said an emergency resolution could be introduced on the floor next week as well.

The State is requiring resolutions on the gas tax issue 30 days in advance of them being implemented, versus the usual 90 days. The changes would not go into effect until the start of the next sales tax quarter, which is June 1st. The County Legislature must submit a resolution to the state by May 2nd in order to meet the June 1st implementation date.

Green, speaking before the County Legislature‘s Audit & Control Committee Thursday, said the county should have held public input meetings, “A small, select group of county only people assembled by the County Executive met and only heard from County Department Heads. This money is being awarded to the entire county. And we’ve missed out on Silver Creek, we’ve missed out on Jamestown, we’ve missed out on Sheridan, not so much for the town of Harmony, but we’ve missed out on the metropolitan areas.”

Green was also critical of the $8.4 million proposed to fund Phase Two of the South & Center Sewer District expansion project, saying it would only benefit “a dozen millionaires from Cleveland.”

Legislator Chuck Nazzaro said four county legislators, including himself, were part of the committee put together by County Executive PJ Wendel to review potential projects to be funded, “There have been comments made that the public was not involved, well, we could argue that point but that’s not why we’re here. There are monies that came into the county. We’re elected officials. We’re listening to everyone. The plan has not been approved yet. But now we’re going to the next step where we’re going into the projects.”

The full County Legislature will vote on the 41 projects to be funded by American Rescue Plan monies at its meeting this Wednesday.