Considering Shared Government Services in New York State: A Guide for Citizens and Public Officials

Campbell Public Affairs Institute | Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University | May 2017

Executive Summary

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Campbell Public Affairs Institute

Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University

May 2017

In recent years, New York State has created a number of programs designed to encourage and empower local governments to improve their efficiency and lower taxpayer burden by reorganizing and sharing service delivery. In 2018, for example, the New York State Budget provides over $100 million in appropriations to support a variety of Local Government Reorganization and Efficiency Programs. Counties, cities, towns, and villages across the State have initiated cost-saving efforts through these programs, and have won state grants ranging from $7,500 for emergency data and phone installation planning in the Town of North Hempstead; to $37,500 for shared highway operations centers in Washington County; to $603,000 for the implementation of consolidated water supply in the Village of Briarcliff Manor.

Sharing local services can take many forms: consolidating existing duplicative services; sharing responsibility for delivering services; unifying contracts with third parties to provide services; reorganizing the responsibilities among governments to deliver services; creating entirely new entities to provide services common to several governments; and sharing equipment and facilities among governments, as well as standardizing equipment specifications.[1] The specific kinds of services local governments might share also range widely. They include education; street and highway maintenance; water; wastewater; sanitation; fire protection; emergency medical services; law enforcement; criminal and civil justice; corrections; tax assessment; financial administration; code enforcement; clerk services; social services and health; libraries; economic development; purchasing of energy and insurance; and zoning.[2] Running through all of these services are necessary administrative support functions, such as accounting, procurement, and equipment maintenance and storage.

Although many local governments have achieved savings through these kinds of efforts, the State of New York believes that more can and should be done—a greater number of local governments should be involved, a greater variety of services to be shared should be considered, and new ways to share them should be discovered. To that end, the FY 2018 State Budget establishes a County-wide Shared Services Property Tax Plan (Part BBB of Chapter 59 of the Laws of 2017).[3] The law applies to the 57 counties in the State outside the City of New York, and calls for local governments to consider ways of sharing services in order to save taxpayer money, and to improve the delivery of those services. The mechanism for this consideration is a series of meetings and hearings, starting with a panel of public officials from the local governments within a given county, and then among those public officials and citizens.[4] Based on the input from these meetings, the county executive is charged with developing a tax savings plan. If the plan is approved by a majority vote of the panel, the county executive coordinates its finalization and implementation. Real property tax savings realized through shared services by participating governments are eligible for one-time, dollar-for-dollar matching funds from the State.

The purpose of this guide is to help public officials and citizens more usefully consider the possibility of sharing services within their counties. In particular, the guide aims to help those officials and citizens who are participating in the meetings and hearings to better identify and frame the issues and questions that we believe are most important in considering different possibilities for shared services. Counties differ widely within the State of New York, on a number of important geographic, demographic, and economic dimensions. Some of the issues and questions identified here will be more relevant to some counties than to others. Our expectation is that individual users of this guide will pick and choose what is most useful in their particular context and for their particular set of discussions.

One issue needs to be clear at the outset: It is important to distinguish this effort to expand and enhance shared services from more ambitious and complicated efforts to undertake major consolidations of government structures, and change forms of political representation and leadership.[5] Sharing certain services and following the best practices for sharing services may ultimately lead local governments to consider consolidating some governmental structures, and may also establish the experiences and trust necessary for such changes, but the focus here is explicitly limited to the sharing of services by different existing governments within a given county. Consolidations of existing governments have occurred in various places across the nation, but they are far more complicated logistically and politically. What we are discussing here is something much more achievable in the short-term.

There are several potential benefits for citizens in having their local governments share more services. The first—and the one that often garners the most attention—is the possibility of cost savings in the form of reduced property taxes. New Yorkers are painfully aware that they live in a high-tax state, and would welcome any tax savings. Cost savings from service sharing come through a variety of interrelated mechanisms, including larger purchasing entities that can lower per-unit prices and increase bargaining power; the elimination of duplicative services; enhanced specialization within a service area through larger scale operations; standardization of procedures, records, and equipment; and more effective and efficient resource allocation.[6]

In addition, New York State has a complicated system of layered governments and agencies providing services and collecting revenues at the state, county, city, town, village, school district, and special improvement district levels—a system that evolved over three centuries. With the slow population growth Upstate in recent decades, that layered system has become financially strained.

Equally important is the quality of the services provided by government, and once again, the sharing of services has the potential to yield benefits. These benefits can result from better cooperation and integrated planning; enhanced efficiencies; centralized and improved personnel training; and the advantages of larger scale operations. Enhanced scale through sharing services can also provide the “critical mass” that enables a smaller government to supply a service that it otherwise could not. Many small towns and villages, for example, do not have or cannot afford the specialized legal expertise to challenge lawsuits or property tax grievances, or to make sure that their planning and zoning codes are consistent with state environmental and other laws.

The combination of reducing property taxes and increasing the quality of public services leads to another possible benefit—making communities more attractive to businesses, which in turn adds to the population and the tax base. The cycle that might result could help local governments reduce property taxes even further, by spreading them across a broader base.

A less obvious but significant additional attraction of sharing services is the potential to enhance democracy and civic health. This could happen through several avenues: providing citizens with a clearer understanding of responsibility and accountability in a particular service area; creating a perception and experience of consistency in service delivery and responsiveness; and instilling greater confidence in government more generally. Citizens in New York State are often confused by the overlapping layers of their local governments, and by the sheer number of local government entities involved in providing services used on a daily basis where they live and work. In Onondaga County, for example, there are 36 separate street and highway service providers.[7] Many citizens are unsure about whom to call and where to go when they experience a problem, which in turn intensifies already-high frustrations with government. In addition, sharing services nudges government structures a little closer to the reality that local communities are already profoundly interconnected. Again in Onondaga County, 69 percent of employed residents work in a different municipality from where they live.[8]

In this guide, we are not taking a stand on shared services. Whether they will help local governments is up to local public officials and citizens to decide, based on their own situations and the services being reviewed. But we do believe that it is worth the time of counties, cities, towns, and villages to take a new and serious look at the potential options, and to engage in good-faith deliberations on the possibilities for shared services, and how they might best work.

What follows in the full guide is a consideration of past examples of shared services in New York, drawing on stories of both success and failure, in order to suggest some best practices and lessons. Next is a similar treatment of some notable experiments in sharing services from other locations around the nation. We then focus on how local governments can realize the highest rates of return from an investment in shared services, followed by concrete suggestions for public officials and citizens participating in the panels and public hearings integral to the development of shared service plans. The final section of the guide identifies and presents what we believe are the most central issues and questions participants in those panels and hearings would want to discuss and clarify during the meetings.

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[1] Yolo County, California, “Yolo Shared Services Program,” 2013.

[2] See for example Commission on Local Government Modernization, “Final Report of the Commission on Local Government Modernization,” 2017.

[3] N.Y. Laws § 59-BBB, 2017.

[4] For more details on the process, see New York Department of State, “County-wide Shared Services Initiative: Guidance Document,” 2017.

[5] See for example Commission on Local Government Modernization, “Final Report of the Commission on Local Government Modernization,” 2017.

[6] Yolo County, California, “Yolo Shared Services Program,” 2013.

[7] Commission on Local Government Modernization, “Final Report of the Commission on Local Government Modernization,” 2017, p. 39.

[8] Commission on Local Government Modernization, “Final Report of the Commission on Local Government Modernization,” 2017, p. 6.