Starting Tuesday, when a UB student steps off campus in any of Erie County's suburbs, from Amherst to Angola, things will be very different. Erie County's "red budget" will be going into effect, cutting services across the board. Sheriff, park, and even snowplow services will be eliminated or reduced. County Executive Joel Giambra has often played up state-mandated Medicaid costs he says have resulted in the county's dire straits, but many counties with smaller revenue bases have managed to keep essential services with those costs. Unfortunately the burden of blame lies squarely on the shoulders of Joel Giambra and his administration and their inexcusable and entirely avoidable budget mismanagement.
Giambra has been threatening his "Red Budget" since this past November in an effort to force the County Legislature into passing a county sales tax hike to nine-and-a-quarter percent. After a dramatic chain of events involving an apparent passage of the tax, county legislators hedged, feeling pressure from their constituency about spending more in taxes for an ineffective government. While this decision has stuck Erie County with no easy way to make up the $108 million deficit, it sends a clear message to Giambra and the Legislature: Erie County does not trust them with their money.
This distrust can be traced all the way back to the 1999 beginning of the Giambra administration, when Giambra inherited an $85 million budget surplus and $211 million tobacco settlement in the county's favor. Add to that $56 million from the sale of the Erie County Medical Center, and Giambra had a healthy cushion to promise tax cuts to get votes. Unfortunately the tax cuts and increased spending have wiped out that surplus and led to a reported 2004 deficit of $135 million. That is an almost half a billion dollar swing, one that Medicaid cannot even come close to accounting for.
The county and state legislatures are not above reproach for the budget mess, as representatives on both sides of the political spectrum have filibustered, broken promises, and formed cliques better than the dirtiest Survivor cast. Combine that with irresponsible spending from the executive branch and the source of the county's problems becomes apparent.
As for the symptoms, Erie County residents - including the majority of UB students living on and off campus - will have to do without significant law enforcement, road maintenance, and public lands services. The "red budget" eliminates the county sheriff's homicide, narcotics, and forensics departments, closes all the county parks, and severely cuts county snowplowing services, potentially crippling towns that depend on the county's snowplowing problems. The budget also triggers almost 1,500 layoffs, severely reduces funding of the Buffalo Zoo, eliminates the county District Attorney office, probation office, will reduce the health inspector staff to two, and eliminates a $21 million subsidy to ECMC Imagine commuting to UB in recent winter weather from any town south of the city, with no roads plowed and county sheriffs without the manpower to respond to an accident, and the ECMC trauma unit unable to handle the influx of injuries. These service cuts affect everyone.
The recently proposed sales tax hike may have made up for this year's budget shortage as many counties have done, but the hike to 9.25 percent is a jump almost no county in the state has made. Most counties have been able to reduce the sting of a sales tax hike by reaching compromises between reducing services and raising taxes. In Erie County's case, Giambra and the Legislature presented citizens with two very unfavorable choices and when many were reluctant to give the county a raise, Giambra has resorted to a painfully effective scare tactic: ripping the carpet out from under county citizens' feet.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
