FINANCE/TAX REDUCTION/MANDATE RELIEF - COMMITTEE

Tuesday, February 22, 2022 - 10:30 AM

 

 

 

Thomas Scozzafava, Chairperson

Noel Merrihew, Vice-Chairperson

 

Chairman Scozzafava called this Finance Meeting to order at 10:30 am with the following Supervisors in attendance: Clayton Barber, Robin DeLoria, Stephanie DeZalia, Derek Doty, Shaun Gillilland, Charlie Harrington, Roy Holzer, Ken Hughes, Steve McNally, Noel Merrihew, James Monty, Tom Scozzafava, Matt Stanley, Ike Tyler, Joe Pete Wilson, Margaret Wood and Mark Wright.   Davina Winemiller was excused.

 

Department Heads present: Laura Carson, Michael Diskin, Judy Garrison, Joseph Provoncha, David Wainwright and Dan Palmer.  Joe Keegan was previously excused.

 

News Media:  Sun News – Tim Rowland.

 

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Good morning.  We’ll call the Finance committee meeting to order.  First on the agenda, Joe Provoncha.  Good morning.

 

PROVONCHA:  Good morning.  Last month, January was a very, very good month.  I think what you’re going to find now is that we’re slowing down a little bit in recording deeds.  The only thing that is going on right now they are telling me, is that banks are selling their mortgages to other banks to get more collateral in theirs.

The monthly report is there as is the other reports and we did bring in over a million dollars last month.  The Real Property conveyance by towns that was up 219 which is a good beginning and we are doing a few deeds here and there.  Now, the transfer tax retention one we brought in $64,900, last year we brought in $5,107,000, so we’re still going to be pretty healthy with that. 

The mortgage tax which will come due at the end of March, this is where you are for the month of January and I will send out to you where you are for the first four months.  Mortgage tax for last year and this year brings up to $18,122,541.00 and that goes to pay for the jail. 

The next is count of document how we’re doing.  Pistol permits have been out of this world.  We have got people calling all the time to make schedules and that’s good.  Everything is going well.

I have the coroner’s reports, we’ve got quite a few in January to finish up the year and we have the checking account and then we have the petty cash account.

The motor vehicle is steady with the three of them, Elizabethtown, Ticonderoga and Lake Placid and the revenue is coming in a little bit.

The yearly sales tax which we just get a little portion of it, and that too is coming in for the casual sales.  I’ve concluded my chart, organizational chart and what we’ve done is the expenditures in the budget is what we’re looking at now, my budget for the county clerk’s office is $897,404, I spent actually $632,028.  Records Management $147,510 and the actual is $49,357, DMV $521,571, and we actually spent $344,108.   The budget for the three departments is $1,566,485, we actually spent $1,025,494, we encumbered $34,954 and so the difference was we did not expend $540,990.

Revenues for the county clerk was actually $3,135,477, records management was $31,983 and DMV was actually $310,052 which means the total amount for the three departments beyond what was budgeted was $1,390,509.53.  If you actually look at it revenue, the unused revenue of the operating costs, we were able to send to the county $2,993,010.13 and that is to be used for the Jail and the Radio project so that’s the analysis of what we’ve done there.  The only thing I have to ask for Chairman, is to designate April as Donate Life.

 

RESOLUTION DESIGNATING APRIL 2022 AS DONATE LIFE MONTH.  Hughes, unanimous

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  That’s an excellent report Joe.

 

PROVONCHA:  Thank you.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Excellent.  Any questions?

 

TYLER:  Joe I’m just curious how are you guys fixed for employees in your departments down there?  Are you looking for more down there?

 

PROVONCHA:  We are.

 

TYLER:  It seems like you guys are doing a lot of work down there and you’re missing several workers at the county with the end of the year process?

 

PROVONCHA:  Yes and we’re going through the Covid with one of my employees just now, she called me yesterday so we’re starting on that trip again.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Okay, any questions for Joe?  If not, thank you.

 

PROVONCHA:  Thank you.

 

****

 

The next item on the agenda was the Auditors, with Laura Carson reporting as follows:

 

CARSON:  Good morning.  Page one is my department head expense report.  The coroners have responded to 13 calls and funeral homes handled 3 removals based on vouchers submitted.

Page two is the supervisor expense report.  Page three is our invoice summary.  We had a very busy month in January we processed over 2,000 invoices and I have a clerical error on my cover sheet we actually noted 295 errors in January as of the date of this report we already noted 60 in February.

Page four is our Auditor budget.  Page five is our Assigned Counsel summary. We received say 189+ vouchers.  I had to stop counting.  We were inundated with Assigned Counsel vouchers which is normal for January.  We only sent about 52 to the chambers.  We had more pressing matters in the month of January at least this year, we had to focus on 1099 and had some Munis year end issues to sort out but we make up for it in February those numbers are pretty high that will be my next year and page six and seven is our assigned counsel budget for ’21 and ’22.  We try to post everything we can to the ’21 budget but we did just have our last check run so in my next report I’ll have the final numbers of the assigned counsel budget for 2021.  Does anybody have any questions?

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  I guess not.

 

CARSON:  Thank you.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Thank you.

 

GILLILLAND:  The Auditor will be going on a vacation on Thursday. (laughter)

 

****

 

The next item on the agenda was the Real Property Office, with Dave Wainwright reporting as follows:

 

WAINWRIGHT:  Good morning.  I’ve included a copy of the budget.  If there is any questions on that?  The next thing is on Friday we put the annual report for 2022 in your boxes.  I don’t know if you’ve seen those yet?  That’s on file now.

 

PALMER:  Let’s do a resolution accepting and placing that on file.

 

RESOLUTION ACCEPTING AND PLACING ON FILE THE REAL PROPERTY TAX OFFICE 2022 ANNUAL REPORT.  Merrihew, Barber

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  All in favor, opposed – carried.  Anything else?

 

WAINWRIGHT:  Yeah, the last thing I wanted to mention was that Andrew Chatterton, he’s our GIS specialist and he’s created three new features for our website.  The first is a web app.  Population numbers for each town go to the last three census count so 2000, 2010 and 2020, it’s got some charts on it and graphs.  You can click on somethings and see some changes.  It’s kind of interesting.  The next is a dashboard, they call it a GIS dashboard and it shows percentages of residential land types based on the assessor’s information so all the residential properties in town whether they be residential vacant lands or improved lands again, charts and graphics and kind of interactive there and the third is, you probably are all familiar with the GIS parcel viewer.  I know a lot of you use that but we’ve heard from people that it doesn’t work all that well with a mobile device it’s a little too cumbersome.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  It doesn’t.

 

WAINWRIGHT:  So he’s created a web app for mobile devices so phones and tablets and whatnot and it’s a little bit paired down but it works pretty slick with that stuff so and that’s it we’ll get those links out on our website hopefully by the end of this week and if you want them on your town sites especially for the population one or something just let us know and we’ll get that over to you.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  So can we link onto these like the residential percentages and so on right on your site?

 

WAINWRIGHT:  Yes you can.

 

SCOZZAFAVA: Okay good.  Okay any questions for Dave?  If not, thank you.  Mr. Diskin.

 

****

 

The next item on the agenda was the Treasurer’s Office with Mike Diskin reporting as follows:

 

DISKIN:  Good morning.  Before I start I want you to know, this is a pretty important day in history today is 2/22/22, you won’t see it again for 100 years so those of you that will still be around you will be able to witness it again in 100 years.

 

MONTY:  Tommy.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  I will be right up here in an urn.

 

DISKIN:  So let’s start with sales tax.  Sales tax was pretty robust for the first couple of months obviously, when we were still compared to last year when we were still in the down turn from Covid it looks quite a bit more but even comparing it to two years ago in 2020, we were up quite a bit.  The first month and the second month of last year we had negative numbers from the year before, this year we have positive numbers in January we were a little over $234,000 more in January and then in February we were over $608,000 more so for the year we were at $842,841.74, ahead of last year at this point.  So, we’re doing really well in sales tax and it’s similar around the rest of the state it’s starting to bounce back.  Covid numbers are good.  A lot of this is premised obviously the high price of gas at this point.  Gas prices are going up and up in sales tax.  Tourism has been great in this area you’ll see by the occupancy numbers and that’s a big drive with sales tax in this county as well and also internet sales continue to increase even with stores starting to get more people coming back to them here locally internet sales still continue to grow each quarter. We are doing very well on that and that’s about it unless you have questions on sales tax?

 

HOLZER:  Questions on the occupancy tax.  Quick lesson, how do you collect all those funds?  Are all those coming from New York State or is it individually?

 

DISKIN:  Occupancy funds?

 

HOLZER: Yes.

 

DISKIN:  They are individually sent to us.  Occupancy is just sent directly to us.

 

HOLZER:  What about Air B&B, BRBO?

 

DISKIN:  Air B&B issues us one check from everybody they collect from, from the county they do not give us a list who they are collecting for unfortunately that’s part of the agreement.  BRBO the owners are responsible to collect themselves, BRBO and any of the other groups like Home Away, Flip Key all those different ones do not collect occupancy tax so it’s up to the owner to collect that.

 

HOLZER: Okay so my understanding is ROOST is now able to I believe it’s Air B&B give us money now based on zip codes of where the money is being generated?

 

DISKIN:  That’s what I heard, yes.

 

HOLZER:  So you don’t know that for a fact yet Mike?

 

DISKIN:  I haven’t seen it myself.  I heard that but I don’t know if they are.

 

HOLZER:  Because in some kind of report whether it comes from ROOST or your office, I think as the towns we should get individually break downs of what each town is generating and it’s possible because they can do it with Air B&B we should be able to figure it out relatively easy.

 

DISKIN:  So far we haven’t been able to figure it out with Munis. 

 

HOLZER: What about the new computer system?

 

DISKIN:  That’s the problem.  With Munis we haven’t figured out a way to do that yet.  We’re working on it.  I’ve asked somebody to look into it but we used to be able to do it with Pentamation pull them up by zip code fairly easily but with Munis it’s not so easy to extract those numbers.  Part of the problem is with extracting them by town because we have so many short term rentals those people register short term rentals from where they live so if they live in New Jersey they are registering in New Jersey and putting in that zip code so we don’t know where that short term rental is.

 

HOLZER:  I just see all of this whether it’s through the Treasurer’s office or ROOST, being a tool for us working making sure all the short term rentals are registered in the county also, let’s some of our towns like me, in particular from Wilmington use it as a guide to see how much we’re generating verses what we’re getting back in the community.  Do you understand where I’m coming from?

 

DISKIN:  Yes.  You have to understand that part of what you’re generate you’re not getting back equal for what you generate, if you did, you would be getting a lot less and North Elba would be getting the majority of it so it’s not based on what you generate in your town on what you get back.

 

DELORIA:  Newcomb would be paying you.

 

DISKIN:  You would have to pay us, Minerva would probably have to pay us as well, Lewis would.  There’s places that you get money from ROOST that you don’t generate or get anything from.  It’s not apples to apples.

 

HOLZER:  Towns like Jay and us we have like a 100 short term rentals now so I assure you we are generating funds for the county.

 

DISKIN:  Yes, absolutely.

 

SCOZZAFAVA: If we use that for sales tax Ticonderoga and Elizabethtown would get the bulk of it.

 

DISKIN:  Yes, with car dealerships and things like that.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Exactly.  We had this discussion hundreds of times.

 

DISKIN:  We’re still, we are working Roy on trying to find out a way to extract zip codes but it’s not going to be as accurate as we would like it to be because those short term rentals as I’ve said, a lot of them register and are entered in our system where the owner of the property is, they could be in Pennsylvania or New Jersey or someplace else and we don’t know where that short term rental is.

 

DELORIA: How are they registering?  Electronically?

 

DISKIN: No they are sending to us and we’re – they are issuing it to us.  They is a way, there is an occupancy registration online most of them are sending it back to us by email, they are emailing it back to us and then we issue them a certificate.

 

DELORIA:  Can you revise the form so they indicate what zip code is your rental in or a defined field?

 

DISKIN:  You could.  Going forward we could do that but all that stuff going back we would have to dig into a lot of it to see where it is but it’s possible.

 

WILSON:  I think in order, because of all the things Mike is describing if you want accurate info you’ve got to have your own local registration or permit or whatever you want to do but you’ve got to collect your own data because so many places are owned by out of state or if they are just going with Air B&B they could be really anonymous so if you don’t do it for your town the system is not going to catch the level of detail.

 

DOTY:  That’s my point as well Joe in order to get a permit in North Elba you have to show a county number for occupancy tax.

 

MONTY:  And that’s for those who decide to get a permit though.  I know we do have a dozen Joe that we collect from in Lewis and I recently found four more that I sent to Dan that weren’t registered so they are out there and I think it behooves us all to look within our communities to find those.

 

DISKIN: I will say that North Elba and I don’t know where you are at with this moratorium Mr. Doty but it has generated a lot of people registering.  People are getting nervous they are going to get shut down. We are getting as many as six or seven a day from North Elba in the last two weeks because they’ve seen it and they said they are going to have a moratorium or a possibility of a moratorium so all of a sudden people are coming out and wanting to register.

 

DOTY:  The public hearing is this week, the 23rd.

 

DISKIN:  Well we will probably get a half a dozen before the 23rd then, today we will probably get some.  We probably have done forty or more or maybe fifty from North Elba over the last month.

 

SCOZZAFAVA: Okay anything more on that subject?

 

DISKIN: No I just want to give you those were the final numbers as you can see for the year where we ended up.  We ended up with a little over $6.6 million, also reflects obviously the increase of the 5% the full year we went through because that actually started in June of 2020, so for the full year you can see what the difference was going to 5% and that’s as well as additionally picking up more people registering.

I’ve given you my budget so far for the year which is minimal because we really haven’t spent a lot in the beginning of the year.

There’s a couple of things I want to discuss with you.  First of all, we did go through the refinancing of two bonds.  One of them was the Public Safety building which we had previously refinanced in 2012 and did very well with that, we saved over a million dollars then in interest that came due with the last three years of it being callable and there’s an additional bond we did with the radio project and the last three years of that are now callable so we went out and refinanced that and we ended up saving $316,000, a little over $316,000 over the life of the bonds for the next three years so it pays to do this.  It costs but when the expenses are rolled into the borrowing so it doesn’t cost us anything out of pocket for fiscal advisors we did a credit rating, do a credit rating with Standard & Poors which we talked about last month we didn’t talk about an increase we got from AA- to AA those things are all paid for through the borrowing and the savings we’ve got so it was really no out of pocket costs to do this and the savings were a little over $316,000 on top of a little over a million-two last time so we’re going to save about a million and a half of interest on those two bonds of the life of those bonds by doing this.  Any questions on that?

There’s another item, actually a couple of things I want to discuss.  The first one, I was approached Friday by a local school district who may be interested in asking us to collect their school taxes next year on behalf of their school district.  They have been having trouble, as many of us are keeping an employee to do that especially school districts that only hire them for part-time for the collection year.  I think they’ve gone through four collectors in the last four years and so they asked us if we would be interested in doing that and I just wanted to get some sort of sense whether the board wanted to pursue that?  I’ve talked to a couple, a few counties have done this in the past and they have come up with rates that are per parcel, they are not trying to make a lot of money on it but we certainly want to cover our expenses to do that.

 

TYLER:  What are your feelings on it Mike?

 

DISKIN:  I would like to try it for a year.  I don’t anticipate adding any people.  My concern is if it works too well they are going to want us to do it and it may become an issue where we can’t do it for everybody or if we have to do it for everybody that asks and add additional staff so there’s a little bit of a concern there but I think we can manage with the people we have right now this school district, I don’t mind telling you is Boquet Valley and the nice part of it I guess, the part that works well is that we’re right here in Elizabethtown, right across the street from the school so anybody who is going to come into town to pay the school the only issue I would have with it is we aren’t going to be able to go to Westport and collect for you.  The collectors have sat two-day sin Westport and two days here. I don’t anticipate us being able to do that but if you look at other school districts are and how spread out they are people don’t, a lot of people still have to travel to pay their school taxes.  I’m guessing that probably 95% of the people, maybe more than that don’t bother coming in and paying person anyways so it’s a lot of just handling checks and the part we can do to facilitate collection for Boquet Valley is that we will be able to take in credit cards and it would be helpful to people to do it that way, to call us online, go online themselves we’d set it up through our credit card company to go online to be able to pay that themselves at home, at night so it would be a benefit to them but I wouldn’t want to try and reach out to a lot of schools to do that.  I just don’t see us wanting to do Minerva or other places, Lake Placid or any of the others just too far away for people who want to come in and pay in person.

 

TYLER:  So how would you work that?  Would it be a charge to the district?

 

DISKIN: We would charge the districts.  I’m trying to figure out what the expense would be.  I’ve talked to, as I say, I’ve talked to several counties who have done that counties do it different way but several counties that I’ve talked to have said that the school district continues to pay the printing of the tax bills through Real Property Tax Services, they have gone as far as stuffing the envelopes, taking them to the school and let the school pay for the postage.  Other counties have done the entire project where they paid for the whole thing as part of the service.  They pay for the cost of the billing, cost of the mailing, everything the envelopes so it depends on how we want to do it and I would have that conversation first with the school district Superintendent as to how much he feels they would want to be able to do and how much they would like us to do before I could come up with a price.  The high that I saw was around $4.00 a parcel, the low was around $3.00 depending on how much service they do for them as far as the cost of printing the bills and postage.  You’ve got two postages actually because you are going to mail them and then you are going to be mailing receipts and while you don’t get 100% of the people that pay you have to potentially plan for mailing out 100% of the receipts too as well so you’ve got to calculate that in there, into that.  I don’t want to go too far or getting too far into doing this unless you all feel that it is something we want to look at?  I don’t think it’s going to be a huge revenue generator.  I wouldn’t want to do it that way. I wouldn’t want to make money obviously from a school district.

 

DELORIA:  Are any of the towns allow people to pay either their water and sewer bill or even their taxes through their town website?  Is anybody into that?

 

DISKIN:  Yes, there’s towns that have websites that have that set up Essex does it, North Elba -

 

DELORIA:  And with that water and sewage would go to the tax collector, it would go into their specific account is that how it’s set up?

 

HUGHES:  Yes, so paygov issues a reference number and so then you go to the paygov website you put in whatever that reference number is.  We have one for the property tax. We have one for the water and sewer.

 

DELORIA:  Is that govpay.net?

 

HUGHES:  Pay.gov I think it is.

 

DISKIN:  Yeah, there’s different companies out there.  We use govpaynet and they have a PLC, a pay location code and you can set up different ones for different accounts.  I think Willsboro uses it, am I correct Shaun?  North Elba uses it as well, there are towns that are using it for various things other than just taxes as well but there are some school districts actually too Ausable Valley you can pay by credit card, Lake Placid School district you can, Ticonderoga I believe does too.

 

DELORIA:  Easier than diving to Westport.

 

DISKIN:  What’s that?

 

DELORIA: It would be easier to pay online than to drive to Westport.

 

DISKIN:  Well, a lot of people don’t pay in person anyways anymore.

 

DELORIA:  Some people do though, right?

 

DISKIN:  Yeah, there’s a few. I would guess there’s a few but not a lot of people pay in person.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Do we get a lot relevied?

 

DISKIN:  Yeah, we still do, $4 million or so.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  So you’re going to get more information?

 

DISKIN: Well, I just want to know if you feel like you want me to go down this road and explore it a little bit.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Once you’ve opened that door, you’ve opened it and it’s going to be very difficult to close it.  You know, I mean what would make sense to me, if they can’t keep a collector pay the collector more money instead of paying us $4 a parcel, give it to the collector.

 

DISKIN:  As I said, that’s my concern.

 

SCOZZAFAVA: My concern is and you know Mike, you’ve been around long enough once you open that door –

 

DISKIN:  Yeah, it’s hard to close it.  It’s hard to say, once you’ve done it for a year it’s hard to say I’m not going to do it anymore.

 

DELORIA:  Well, with school districts, are they not required to have a school tax collector?

 

DISKIN:  Well, they have a collector but some of them do it different ways, some hire the collector just for the tax collection season, some of them have an employee on staff.  I know in my town; Ticonderoga they have one of their school employees who acts as the collector but in the past they have hired collectors who just work part time for that season.  Others have utilized their town clerk to be also be the school tax collector because they are right there.  If they work on an agreement with the school and they are able to do it some are successful, some are not so successful in separating those two duties but yeah, there’s a couple.  Most schools have a school district tax collector who is a separate part time employee just for the time and it’s just from late August when they prepare the bills and send them out until mid-November or so.

 

SCOZZAFAVA: Alright we’ll wait until you get more information.

 

DISKIN:  So if you like, I can explore this a little bit more and get you some information, get some numbers together and what I feel what it will costs to be able to do this but I’m a little hesitant because I just have concerns with if it works too well and I think it will work well here in Boquet Valley but it may not work so well in schools that are far away but yet, they might request that.  It’s similar to town tax collection, you know we can do it here but people want to pay in their town they don’t want to come here to do it.

 

DELORIA: The towns could do away with their receiver of taxes and then the town clerk correct?

 

DISKIN:  Yes, you can combine that job for many towns have done that.  What’s happening now is a lot of them is their tax collector is retiring and instead of hiring someone they are giving it to the town clerk, pay them a little bit more and have them do it because they are right there ready anyways.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Alright, we’ll see what you find out.

 

DISKIN:  One last thing and I don’t want to keep going but, I wanted to fill you in on where we are with foreclosures and there has been a little bump in the road if you want to call it that.  There’s always a what if or but kind of thing so they did allow us to start doing foreclosures on January 15th then on January 16th they issued a memorandum that said, tax lien foreclosures should continue to be conferenced as set forth in the administrative order 262-21. So I contacted the County office, I immediately talked to the County Attorney they also issued a second ruling on the 22nd that said, all tax lien foreclosures may resume in a normal course subject to conferencing requirement so conferencing requirements we found out the County Attorney found out talking to the Office of Court Administration and some of the Supreme Court Justices means that you have to give the people the ability, send them a notice and tell them that they have the ability to have a conference with someone at the court level before you can foreclose on their property.  We are still working through how long you have to give them; how long you have to wait before you send them that notice before we send it out but we have to send them the letter saying you can have a conference with them.  I’m not sure what the conference is going to ask them for?  We don’t handle the conference personally my understanding is that there is someone called, got the title referee who handles these, you contact them, they sit down with you whether it’s through video chat or phone call or in person how they handle it I would guess a video call, video chat or phone call because courts still aren’t taking people in person and find out why they haven’t been able to pay and if they have a valid excuse.  I will be honest with you I don’t think a valid excuse is, I just don’t have the money.  I think a valid excuse is I already paid for it.  I have proof that I paid which they should have come forward and told us that by now or we made an error in notifying them or something we did legally done incorrectly which again, I think after four years, before 2022, someone would have told us that but we have to go through this conferencing.  Every county that I’ve talked has said, yeah we are going to go through it some of them are handling it differently than we are it depends so there’s no definite set way that they are doing it everybody is still trying to figure out how to do this conferencing.  We are prepared.  We have all the labels ready.  We still don’t know yet whether we have to mail first class mail, certified mail or bot as we do foreclosures that’s all information I’m trying to gather and the County Attorney is trying to get all that information together. How long do we have to give them from the time of the letter before they can say, yeah we’ve had a sufficient opportunity to have a conferencing whether it is two weeks or you have to give them 90 days again like we did before so these are all answers we don’t have right now but it has delayed the foreclosure process unfortunately it wasn’t just so simple as January 15 came and you can the process back on and start foreclosures again.  One more stumbling block in the foreclosure process.

 

SCOZZAFAVA: Can we get another list of what is waiting to be foreclosed?

 

DISKIN:  Yes in fact we were running one this morning and we ran all the labels for those people who are being notified so I can get you the most current list of people who are out there. We have all the certified labels ready to go, regular mail envelopes ready to go we’re just waiting to find out what the contents of that letter are that are going to be in there so we can draft a generic letter and send it to everybody.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  So these are abandon properties, nobody is living in them does that make a difference?

 

DISKIN: I don’t know the answer to that.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Properties that were purchased in the last tax sale that they never did anything with?

 

DISKIN: I don’t know the answer to that.  You still have to give them an opportunity to be conferenced or not whether it includes vacant land of it it’s just for, we’re going to send it out there to everybody just for our sake.

 

DEZALIA:  I know the conferencing is a regular thing that’s done with mortgage foreclosures so will we be having to pay this referee?  Will that be another cost to the county or appoint that referee?

 

DISKIN: I don’t know the answer to that to be honesty with you.  There’s so many things out there that we don’t know the answer to, I don’t believe we are going to have to pay them.  When they first told me this, they told me also that they were going to be allowed to have an attorney there and if they couldn’t have an attorney present, the county would have to pay for it.  We have found out since then according to Mr. Manning, that may not be true so we may have court appointed attorneys we may have to pay for, we might not these are all things that he’s still waiting to get answers on before we can move forward on this.

 

MONTY: So they, being who Mike?  I keep hearing they keep telling us, they keep telling us.

 

DISKIN:  The State.

 

MONTY:  But who in the State?

 

DISKIN:  Office of Court Administration.

 

MONTY:  Office of Court Administration the same people that I’m waiting for four months to finalize a $150 edit to a Judge’s paperwork and now my AUD is going to be late because they are all working from home and nobody has had time to look at it.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Exactly.

 

PALMER:  I mean the order came from the Legislature you know it isn’t, the Office of Court Administration is overseeing it but the –

 

MONTY:  So I’m assuming they have multiple referees right because I’m quite sure there is going to be several of these throughout the 63 counties in New York State.

 

DISKIN:  I would say, just be careful what you assume.  It maybe one referee for all 63 counties.  I don’t know the answer to that Mr. Monty. There are so many questions that we are waiting to get answers on and Dan has been still trying to pursue this along with all the other things that he does as County Attorney.

 

MONTY: I don’t think the State has the answers for this.

 

GILLILLAND:  Yeah, I was just wondering if this was an administrative decision or legislative?

 

PALMER: I think it was legislative.  I think it was included as part of their order after the January 15th date.  I think the problem is it was originally designed for town courts for mortgage foreclosures so in other words, if a bank was going to foreclose on somebody they had to notify the Judge, the Judge would then notify the parties that they would have to have a conference before the mortgage could start, the foreclosure.  When they wrote that, I think they painted a wide brush and didn’t realize they were also including within that language the tax foreclosure sales.  The whole concept that you would be able to get everybody in the State of New York into a conference prior to a foreclosure occurring is just almost ridiculous.  It’s a really poorly worded rule that really needs to be revised the State.

 

SCOZZAFAVA: Okay anything else Mike?

 

DISKIN:  That’s enough.

 

SCOZZAFAVA: Yes, it is.  Thank you.  Dan.

 

PALMER: Just real quick – I don’t know if everybody has returned the signed contract?  I’d like to get those American Recovery Funds out.  I don’t know if some of them got returned to Dan’s office?  I’ve got like eight copies of mine.  I’m not sure whose I’ve got.

 

DEZALIA:  So that’s the final one?  Because I thought we talked about changing that one date to 2024?  It’s going to stay 2022?

 

PALMER:  You can revise it on there.  I don’t care.

 

DEZALIA:  Oh, okay.

 

PALMER:  But if you guys get those signed I’ll go ahead and get those payments out.  The auditors want some information and they gave me a list of things that they are looking for but I can get that to you.  I’ll try to put a form together or something that you can use but I would like to get your payments out so if you haven’t signed it and you want to get it signed and back to me I can start processing those payments.

And the other thing I’m working on, we’re working on and we’re almost there is the weighted vote.  We did get the population numbers, pretty much most of the population in the county went down.  We do have the simple majority done. We’ve got the others to do the 2/3, 3/5 and the ¾ and we are hopefully, what happens is we have to a local law.  I’m hoping to be able to introduce the local law at the meeting coming up in March and then we can go ahead and get the weighted vote out of the way so to speak.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  And when that’s done do you have to recalculate everything else that we do out here based on the weighted vote?  You know all the other things that we do.  Sales tax distribution all that.

 

PALMER:  Yeah, those will all change according to the weighted vote.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Good.

 

DISKIN:  Sales tax distribution is based on two things, your assessment and your population once we get the changes in population we’ll change it for next year.

 

PALMER:  So that’s the only impact to that formula is the population.

 

SCOZZAFAVA:  Okay anything further to come before the committee?  If not, we stand adjourned.

 

            As there was no further discussion to come before this Finance meeting it was adjourned at 11:10 a.m.

 

Respectfully submitted,

 

 

 

Judith Garrison, Clerk

Board of Supervisors