JAMESTOWN – Jamestown Mayor Sam Teresi has offered his thoughts on the recent passage of the 2013 to 2014 New York State Budget – saying that while he was disappointed that some issues weren’t addressed, there were also some “silver linings” in the spending plan.
Teresi said one of the major sticking points of the budget in relation to Jamestown and other small cities is that it didn’t provide any increase in the Aid Incentives to Municipalities program, also known as AIM.
“That sat stagnant or actually had been reduced for many years,” Teresi explained. “We actually saw an uptick about five or six years ago. If you take a look at it for inflation adjustment, Jamestown and every other city of the state is still receiving less in the way of general purpose AIM payments than we were back in the 1980s. That is ridiculous in an era when the state is asking cities to do more and more and the state transferring its burden down the line to local governments.”
Teresi said one of the main mandates the city has had to cope with in recent years is an almost continuous increase in contributions to the employee pension system. Since Teresi began serving as Mayor in January 2000, he says the contributions have seen an enormous increase.
“The pension payment in 1999 when I first ran for office – including BPU employees – was a total of $129,000. In the following years we had several stock market crashes during that time and the burden was transferred to local governments disproportionately and this year between the city and the BPU we are projected a payment of about $5.9 million dollars.”
Teresi says he was also disappointed to see that there wasn’t any reform in the binding arbitration process between municipalities and labor groups.
The mayor added that he was pleased to see the state provide more road construction funding for local governments, including Jamestown. And he was obviously pleased that the state was able to pass an on-time budget for the third year in a row.
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