FINANCE/TAX REDUCTION/MANDATE RELIEF COMMITTEE
Tuesday, January 21, 2025 - 10:30 AM
Steve McNally, Chairperson
Robin DeLoria, Vice-Chairperson
Chairman McNally called this Finance Meeting to order at 10:30 am with the following Supervisors in attendance: Matthew Brassard, Chris Clark, Robin DeLoria, Shaun Gillilland, Ken Hughes, Charlie Harrington, Steve McNally, Cathleen Reusser, Matt Stanley, Ike Tyler, Joe Pete Wilson, Margaret Wood and Mark Wright. Clayton Barber, Derek Doty, James Monty, Favor Smith and Davina Thurston were excused.
Department Heads present: Hannah Carson, Laura Carson, Michael Diskin, James Dougan, Judy Garrison, Mary McGowan, Dan Manning, Michael Mascarenas and Jack Moulton.
Chelsea Merrihew was excused.
Also present: William Tansey. Joe Keegan was excused.
News media: None present.
MCNALLY: I call the Finance/tax reduction/mandate/relief committee to order. First up, County Clerk, Chelsea Merrihew.
GARRISON: She is excused.
MCNALLY: Excused. Auditor – Laura Carson
L. CARSON: Good morning everybody. You all had a chance to review my report. Do you have any questions? Any concerns?
MCNALLY: Any questions for Laura? If not, thank you. Real Property, Hannah Carson.
H. CARSON: Good morning. So included in my report I had where the state had amended the original 466-A volunteer firefighter and ambulance workers exemption. Previously they only allowed it for people that served on the fire department or ambulance within their town but they are now extending it to other towns so if you would like to amend the local law that you had passed allowing somebody to serve in the fire district for the next town over you need to amend the local law that you previously passed and get that to my office so we can make sure the changes happen and make sure your assessor know too for anybody that applies. I had the county had passed that. I don’t know if they need to amend it or not?
MASCARENAS: The fire fighter exemption, I think Bill did all that work on that?
MANNING: Yes he did.
TYLER: This is not a county wide thing?
H. CARSON: The County did pass a local law.
MASCARENAS: We did pass a local law but whether or not we want to amend it or not I’m not sure at this point in time I think we need – Mr. Tansey kind of led that project in terms of that local law for not only us but the town so I would want to speak to him.
TYLER: So it’s up to the towns to do it locally if they want to do it?
MASCARENAS: If they want to extend the extension to – do you know anything about this Mr. Tansey?
TANSEY: Just a little bit the local law the problem with it was it limited the fire districts in their towns to residents to their districts and their towns. It sounds like this new law is expanding. There is a lot of towns and a lot of districts are people who work or spend more time in the other town so they wanted to extend it outside.
TYLER: Do you know if the fire district has to pass it through them and then bring it to the town board or town board can just do it?
TANSEY: It’s a resolution for the taxing district so the fire district would have to do it.
TYLER: Perfect, thank you.
TANSEY: I’ll get with Hannah and we’ll hash through this and get some proposals out for everybody.
H. CARSON: Other than that I just wanted to let you guys know that we have updated our website with the tax rolls, tax rates and the county apportionment charts and information.
MCNALLY: Wonderful. Anything else for Hannah? Alright, thank you. Treasurer’s office – Michael Diskin.
DISKIN: Let’s start with sales tax both of our checks came in before I sent it out. You can see we started out about even for the year but we did take a pretty good major cut the second check almost $375,000. I looked at some similar statistics in similar counties around us, everybody seems to be in the same situation with the second check that came out his for most counties was in a similar situation almost everybody was in the negative I really don’t know why at this point but every county seemed to be in that particular area. I know Clinton County although they weren’t as bad as us, we were down about 15% Franklin 17%, Warren County was almost 12%, Washington County 15% so at least the surrounding counties, a few other counties if you look around the state were very similar to us. I just think it is a sign of what’s happening with sales tax. We’ve talked about this at the end of last year how we expected to see a little bit of a decline in sales taxes. Hopefully we’ll make up for that. Anybody have any questions on the sales tax?
TYLER: Once Warren County gets Minerva they will be all set.
DISKIN: That’s why we are losing all our sales tax to them.
Occupancy tax – again we had a really descent month in occupancy. We have one more month actually to go on this and what I mean by that is we track February through January which is actually January through December with one month to go we’re $6.6 million a little over $6.6 million last year we are at six million seven-fifty so I definitely think we will be over, we are going to be close to $7 million in occupancy for the year.
TYLER: Can you refresh my fasting deteriorating memory of when we will expect our ROOST check?
MCNALLY: I got mine last week.
GILLILLAND: I got mine.
MASCARENAS: Yeah that was third quarter I believe.
DISKIN: Yes so once we get the December figures in which are coming in now during the month of January by the end of January we will have the numbers so sometime early February you’ll get the last quarter. We have to wait for the finals to come in for December which pretty much is done although we may get a few more trickle in before the end of the month and once we do that we’ll take a look at October, November and December and I’ll tell you what is owed to you and send it out and then we will create a new formula for the following year.
TYLER: Thank you.
MASCARENAS: Being that it is percentage based in terms of the calculation it should be a little more than probably what you got last year with $7 million projected to come in but again, when Michael gets that final tally that’s what it will be based on.
DISKIN: That’s about all I had for you other than you probably have some questions on the short term sales tax law, I should say short term rental law. There was a webinar I know Mr. Hughes was in on it. I don’t know if Mike had a chance –
MASCARENAS: No I was on a housing meeting with CDBG during it so I had a conflicting meeting so thank you.
DISKIN: Ken was in there and several people from my office, I know Mr. Manning was there, I believe our Weights & Measurers, Dan Woods sat in on it too. There were a lot of things discussed. I don’t know if you got a copy of this? This was a webinar of all the slides that are out there. I can forward them to you but there’s still a lot of questions. Basically from my understanding this isn’t going to really go into effect until sometime in September the law. Once it’s passed it’s 275 days afterwards and so that brings us to my understanding September 22 so that’s when it will go into effect. In the meantime, I think it will be advisable to get together with a group of people and see how we want to approach notifying our residents of people that are out there. We have approximately 1700 maybe 1800 people that are registered with us right now so we do have a registry in the sense that we assign everybody a payer number so we maybe ahead of other counties in that we have a registry of sorts that we can use to provide to them to say this is your registration number. I really think that what is going to happen now with people seeing this I think more people are going to go to an online booking agency rather than try and do it themselves just so they don’t have to deal with sales tax. I think you are going to see more people signing up with companies. I was surprised to hear that there was 137 different booking agencies I really only knew of two or three to be honest with you but the state says there are people who are presenting this, said there are over 137 different booking agencies are being used in the State of New York. Those booking agencies are going to be required to contact their people and they cannot work with them or do any booking for them unless they have a registration number to prove they are registered with the county and have a registration number. I think for people who are trying to do this on their own it may turn them towards the VRBO’s and the Airbnb’s and the other companies just so that they probably will not have to deal with this otherwise they are going to have to go out on their own and send sales tax to us.
STANLEY: I’m not on the committee but will you now from Airbnb and VRBO instead of just getting a lump sum check will be broken down by property?
DISKIN: I believe that’s what I was told. There will be a list of people. A list provided to us. I think it is every 90 days it has to be sent to us of who they sent money in for.
STANLEY: Perfect.
HUGHES: They don’t break down the sales tax?
DISKIN: No but they will be providing a list. They are required to provide that. We have to share our registry with each town or village on request of who is registered there and the sales tax will go just as any other sales tax it will go to the state and then sent back to us.
TYLER: Was there anything in the webinar about penalizing people that don’t do it?
DISKIN: Yes there’s absolutely penalties in there including the booking agencies. There’s two warnings and then there is I believe a $200 fine and then $500 for each subsequent offense they don’t do it and for the booking agencies it is per day $500 a day for each day if they don’t send their reports in on time so they are pretty hefty penalties but you have to give them two verbal warnings or are they in writing?
MANNING: They should be in writing.
STANLEY: So there are chapter amendments to this?
DISKIN: There are. They have not been passed yet but there are.
STANLEY: So, how does that work? So is the law passed? Do the chapter amendments need to be passed? That’s what I am wondering. What is the timeline to make sure this is all passed and is ready to be actually implemented?
MANNING: From what they explained I think it is September twenty some date. The chapter amendments have been made but they haven’t been considered so from what I understand the legislature will take it up, reconsider those amendments and then they anticipate ready to roll by September 25.
The notifications Mike, I would suggest that we send letters to everyone we have on our hotel/motel registry and then we can do a PR campaign also and I think that’s the best we can do.
DISKIN: We definitely have to notify them in person because as you all know, we have a vast majority of these people that are not in this area so we just do a PR campaign and puts it out in all the papers and radio and Facebook whatever it’s not going to reach a lot of the people so we are going to need to go through our registry, get the most current address we have and we do have those on file and as we get them updated we change them and actually send them a letter. The question is do we send them a registered letter or just a regular letter? A registered letter is obviously very expensive to send out but at least we know they are going to get it.
MANNING: I would send both because a regular letter is presumed received 21 days if not returned a lot of people don’t sign for registered letters although it may be expensive you may want to choose one or the other but or if registers come back then you send them.
DISKIN: We could treat it like a foreclosure letters where we send out registered and certified and regular and then see what happens but as we get them back we know that we’ve got bad addresses and then we can go start to look for these people.
MANNING: And we can charge a registry fee so we can recoup these amounts of money as long as they are reasonable and not over the top.
DISKIN: I think we need to get together as a group or a subcommittee or whatever to come up with a registration fee that is reasonable and not going to scare people off but reasonable enough to recoup our money. It is a onetime registration fee.
STANLEY: Should we still need be encouraging people to register the way we have been having them?
MANNING: Yes because they are two separate entities.
DISKIN: Absolutely we will continue to register but the interesting part is that they are going to re-register every two years and we will have to figure out a mechanism we don’t want to be sending out 1700 new registrations every two years so we might want to look at staggering those out over a three or four month period where we don’t send them all at once because to get 1700 registrations out and 1700 registration back all at once is going to be pretty cumbersome to handle.
STANLEY: But it is going to be their responsibility to register correct?
DISKIN: Yes.
STANLEY: If they don’t they’ll get fined so like, do we need to do anything if it’s their job to re-register and if they don’t the fine is going to be there.
MANNING: We should notify them.
DISKIN: Yeah that’s a question like I say if we get together as a small group and lay out some of these things.
MANNING: Very small. Mike, myself and a couple of people.
DISKIN: I just don’t think we should have one person making all these unilateral decisions. I think we have to sit down and say this is what we need to do how do we want to accomplish those? What’s the best way to get to the end with this and get a reasonable registration fee and follow the law and not make it so cumbersome?
MANNING: Yeah I don’t think it’s going to be a big yank. I mean your office is going to have some more duties unfortunately with the mailing. One good thing is now I guess Matt did you know when we started the hotel/motel local law we had a heck of a time with Airbnb, they wouldn’t give us the names or the addresses of the short term rental people that were contributing but they would give us the amounts. Now this local law is going to remedy that so that’s really good and not only with just Airbnb but all others and at the time I think it was the general consensus of the board that was on the panel then that something is better than nothing don’t push it Airbnb so that’s a good thing they have come up with.
TYLER: You mentioned a fine. The state gets that fine Mike?
DISKIN: No I don’t believe so. I believe that’s ours.
TYLER: You mentioned the money goes to the state and then they send it to us is that?
DISKIN: That’s the sales tax.
TYLER: Oh is that the Department of State that gets that and send to us?
MANNING: Taxation and Finance will probably get it and then send it to us.
DISKIN: The sales tax or the fines?
MANNING: The sales tax.
DISKIN: The sales tax is my understanding is going to be treated the same way you have to register for the sales tax, submit your sales tax to the state and then they are going to take the 4% out of it and remit the money back to us.
MANNING: And then we are going to have to probably revise our hotel/motel local law not very much but my definition I think is going to be better than they have but they don’t include campgrounds if it’s a tent no sales tax no hotel but if it is one of these buildings –
DISKIN: Has a platform or any of these other things that are up there.
MANNING: Not that we probably care too much about that but they exist.
MCNALLY; Just sitting here as an average citizen you would say that the county should receive 4% of that sales tax but being an elected official I realize that there’s no way that 4% is going under the Governor’s nose without them picking it apart so our 4% will probably be equivalent to what she charges for Medicaid increase next year so don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how we are going to spend that money because trust me, we’ve played this game before.
DISKIN: Yeah I think some of you are going to see what’s happening when they gave us the sales tax on the mail order stuff you saw that AIM went away and other things went away –
MCNALLY: Well, they paid AIM out of our money.
DISKIN: Right so somewhere this money is going to get pulled back so we may see sales tax increase but decrease someplace else.
MCNALLY: So just be aware of that.
MASCARENAS: Do we have a current registration fee Mike?
DISKIN: No, we do not.
MCNALLY: If a town already has one I didn’t think you could charge county and the town fee? I saw that somewhere. If the town like I know a lot of towns have a fee and they use that fee to offset inspections and things like that, it’s $300 a year and they have a penalty fee also but I thought that if the towns had one the county couldn’t charge an additional fee?
MANNING: It sounds like they are two different things one is we are doing the registry and these are our registry. Yours is maybe part of a short term rental local law maybe where you’re charging them fees for like you say, code enforcement violations things like which are completely different than registries. There is a part of the law that say towns can have their own registration if they have in effect but I think if they don’t already have it in effect I think we are it but I would have to double check.
MCNALLY: I just had one more comment. Sitting here this is a personal belief of mine when the occupancy tax was proposed past years ago at the 4% level the 4% they started off it was a great program. Three and two okay we saw them guys as tourism promotion it was wonderful. We weren’t talking about $7 million dollars. We are talking $7 million dollars now that we are giving 60% of it to a company that I heard has a $4 million dollar fund balance. We need to address this. I personally think we need to address this. That’s all I have to say about that and if it is a change in the law of what we do with our occupancy money or what we do we have to do something with it.
DISKIN: The first year that we enacted the occupancy tax was the year 2000, we broke a million dollars by about year ten we were up about $3 million and now here we are fifteen years later, we are going to break $7 million that is the rise in what’s happening.
MCNALLY: Four million dollars goes to ROOST that’s a lot of money.
HUGHES: So Steve are you proposing that at some point this year a view of the law?
MCNALLY: We have to review the law. When the law was proposed at the time we were hoping to generate a million dollars that we could pay for what we had to pay out of the budget and then we decided we will give them 95% to cover that but now we are talking years later, we are talking $4 million dollars.
HUGHES: So it sounds like something you are interested in taking a look at?
MCNALLY: I think we need to that’s a lot of money.
DISKIN: I think it is going to take legislative action.
MCNALLY: It is but we have to start somewhere.
MANNING: It’s in the actual law, the New York State law every county has I’m going to say they probably all have hotel taxes, motel taxes but in our actually law and it says I believe 95% goes to it doesn’t say ROOST but ROOST predecessor 5% goes to us for administrative fees, if we are unhappy with ROOST then there is a little bit of mechanism there that says we talk to them about it and then we look further but if you are going to want to change the allocation you are going to have to ask to change that state law by municipal home rule.
MCNALLY: I think we have to look at that.
STANLEY: Once again I’m not on this committee but I also want to say make sure you don’t like bite the hand that feeds you. It maybe that we are getting increases in revenue from occupancy tax because of the good job that is being done by the marketing of this county so I would just caution people, just because the money is there like, I would like an incentive to be able to go out and work harder for something too so I’m saying just don’t bite the hand that feeds you like, if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.
DELORIA: I think it is broke but I also recommend perhaps the Chairman and the County Manager can put together a small committee so that they can really look at where we are and the origin with the law and where we were then and where we are today because I think it needs to be address but from a committee standpoint that would be my recommendation. Maybe Shaun is willing to work with Mike and set that up.
TYLER: Just quick, talking about the hand that feeds you maybe take and we can figure out a way where they can send the towns a few more crumbs out of that money would help out too.
GILLILLAND: We’ve done this exercise two or three times and usually the outcome is we opt to not go forward and I think the root of the problem is we have to define what it is we as a county want because right now the only solution on the table is ROOST and the way they are operating and some other idea that we don’t have any leaps and bounds on I that we can define and we can define it by objectives, we can define it by either monetarily or return on investment or activities or something else like that and whether we want to put that down on paper or put it out to bid but I think the important thing is we can appoint a group to do this but it’s going to need some deep thinking of what it is, what entity and what we want that entity to do because the only game in town we have a model for is ROOST. I want ROOST to do a whole lot more. I took a log and beat them over the head to start working in areas of tourism and other stuff under this new director things are happening because he is definitely listening to what we want but if we just go out and throw the baby out with the bath water and not actually determining what it is we want then we’ll probably end up with some Glens Falls, Saratoga consulting group that will instead of taking it somewhere else they will take it out of county and that is what I am really weary of. That’s my thought.
REUSSER: Just thinking about this practically most of our comprehensive plans with the town levels don’t even address short term rentals as a category. It wasn’t even placed at the time Town of Elizabethtown’s was established with that being said, what we can and can’t do at a town level verses at what we can and can’t do at the county level might be – we don’t want to double dip or penalize people having short term rentals. It’s more in controlling it and having the proper processes take place from the acknowledgement, we have a short term rental in our town to having codes and enforcement, fire safety go out and look at those so this is a bugger. Long story short I’m an advocate for some kind of task force to look at this.
MASCARENAS: Just to weigh in quick, I think Shaun actually stumbled onto something really good there in terms of – I’ve been here since 1999 and I don’t think we’ve ever been clear in what our mission is for those that we give an awful lot of money to and that transparency isn’t always there which causes certain members including myself to try to understand what really is happening. We all know there’s websites. We all know there is information but in terms of how that is getting done I couldn’t tell you and I think we need to learn more about their processes and procedures and wages and what are their budgets looking like and who else are they doing work for and what is the rates for those things and are we overpaying or are we supplementing other counties for their work or maybe we are not? But I think we need to know all those things and dealing with fact instead of feeling and so I think a fact finding mission Shaun is what you are really get at there and figuring out just what are the facts, what is the fiction and okay what are we going to do about it following that?
DELORIA: Right and I don’t know how many supervisors have read that local law but clearly if we don’t amend the local law it’s going to be status quo. Like Shaun said, he had to get out the log and beat them over the head so we could get a little more kick back. BS, if the local law needs to be rescinded so that we could put a better local law in place to retain what we have and maybe come up with a better solution then by all means.
TYLER: I think the fact, we have individuals on this board that are on their board that we kind of give them a mission of what we want here on the board and they go to the meetings and find that out what we need to know.
GILLILLAND: You mentioned there Robin local law I think – you mentioned the legislative language that allows us to take that 95%
DELORIA: County law, yes.
GILLILLAND: Well it’s not county law it is state law.
DELORIA: Oh, it is state law for Essex County specifically correct.
DISKIN: I think the big hanging point on this to be honest with you is the 95% that’s built right into the language and I think that’s the thing you are going to have to key in on whatever you do when you go to change this state law is to look at that 95% language and come up with some different language that is more comfortable for this county because that 95% is right in that statue and that’s where you have got to work around it.
MANNING: I think there is a middle ground between some of these ideas. Mike is right our statute amongst all the counties is the only statue that dictates that 95% go directly a particularly entity. Most of them state, some state that it goes into the general fund for the purposes of tourism and the promotion of tourism and then you contract out which you could do. Some of them state that it goes into a special segregated tourism fund to be used for tourism ours happens to say 95% goes to ROOST predecessor now ROOST for tourism promotion. Ours is a unique animal. Don’t know how it got there I have my ideas.
MCNALLY: Well we were talking about a million dollars when this was enacted. Anybody else?
DISKIN: One other thing I want to add quickly about this new law and this is where I think as a group if we can get together as a small group we are going to have to rely some on the towns and part of this law says that they have to provide a map of egress that has to be prominently displayed, they have to provide fire extinguishers, smoke alarms all that stuff has to be out there and for the county to inspect that, that is going to be difficult. They also have to provide $300,000 worth of insurance prove they have that which they can prove by signing up with a booking agency like VRBO or Airbnb
MANNING: Our registry rules will require specific insurance.
DISKIN: As we re-registry these people we are going to have to have proof of that and to get out there and look at that. They are going to have to certify that they have that, self-certify so it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to look at it but they have to self-certify. Do we want to inspect these people? Do we want to make sure that is there because these people are all going to be self-certifying that they’ve got, yes I’ve got $300,000 in insurance, yes, I’ve got fire extinguishers, yes I’ve got smoke alarms, yes, I’ve got a map up there of where the egress is of all the rooms on this property and so on. I mean there is a lot of things that is required that are self-certified how far do we want to go to verify that? So these are all things I think as a group whether it is a small group or this committee itself has to come up with an answer on how we are going to do that.
WOOD: Schroon has had a short term rental law for a couple years now and there was a big struggle between this are we going to inspect or are we going to self-certify. We do inspect. Our codes officer gets an extra stipend every year for that however in talking with him we find that he can find the problem say there’s a bed up against windows that should be code egress from the room and that type of thing so they’ll move it until they get their or do what they want anyway. Well, I’m not sure but for liability purposes for the towns might be better to rely on self-certification to take the onus off but you filled out the inspection form and you said everything is fine. It also could lighten the load for the codes person.
DISKIN: That’s where I think these fines come in as well because if you somehow inspect it and find out somebody whether it is a complaint from somebody that has stayed there you notify them you say there’s violations here you give them two notices of violations then you can start fining them and I think that’s where some of those fines are going to kick in as well.
MCNALLY: Anybody else? Anything else for Mr. Diskin? Alright thank you. County Manager, Michael Mascarenas.
MASCARENAS: I’ve got nothing. I’ve talked enough.
MCNALLY: Alright. North Country Community College excused. Anything else for Finance? If not, we are adjourned.
As there was no further discussion to come before this Finance/Tax reduction/mandate relief committee it was adjourned at 11:05 a.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Judith Garrison, Clerk
Board of Supervisors