Mineola Village Board Adopts Revised Budget

Mineola residents will be getting a little more help to their village tax bill with new reductions and cuts to several budget lines which were announced at the most recent meeting of the this past Wednesday.

Village treasurer Giacomo Ciccone outlined the adjustments to the 2011-12 budget, which included  the reduction of sales tax revenue from $53,487 to $52,234. The new amount is based upon the 2010 census.

Trustee Lawrence Werther called the amount an “insult” saying that “anyplace else in the state of New York where there’s a city that coexists in a county, the villages get a proportional share of the sales tax revenue.”

The lone exception to this law is Nassau County.

“That was a wink and a nod to the good old days when the good old boys on the county board of supervisors so to purposely keep the towns out of it,” Werther said, estimating that sales tax revenue for Mineola should be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Other high profile adjustments to the 2011-12 budget include life insurance going from $24,200 to $20,000, dental insurance costs falling from $119,000 to $106,000, a reduction in life insurance in the library fund from $3,000 to $2,000 and  a reduction of dental insurance under the library fund  from $16,000 to $15,000.

According to , the insurance change is due to a switch in providers, and the amount of coverage would remain the same for non-union employees.

The reductions result in a 3.5 percent overall tax increase. The board had been facing at a previous meeting.

“Most of these villages that I see in the newspaper are in the high single digits, low double-digits and we are obviously under the same strains they are,” Deputy Mayor Paul Pereira said. “And yet we’re not cutting these services, we’re still going to provide the same things people have come to expect in this village and we’re doing it at a respectable tax increase for the times that we’re in.”

The total amount of the 2011-12 village budget is about $18.55 million. The 2010-11 budgeted totaled $17,904,868, while the 2009-10 budget was only about half a million less at $17,451,938.

Describing the budget as “very fair” and “very balanced,” Trustee Werther said that he did not make comments on the budget “because I didn’t want it to seem like it was politicized.”

Much of the increase for the budget has been placed on mandated expenses from the state, including medical premiums which increased by $410,000 and retirement contributions which rose $247,000. Union contracts also called for an additional $235,000 in spending. Combined these three increases accounted for $892,000 in new spending.

Again, Mayor Strauss stressed that “if it weren’t for the increases from the state, we’d have a zero percent tax increase.” The mayor also gave credit to the previous administration under , as well as Trustee Werther, who served as acting mayor and helped to initiate the budget process.

“They put in ideas last year and the year before that to help us reduce going forward the financial impacts on the residents,” Strauss said, singling out the paying off of two bond anticipation notes (BANs), tipping fees and early retirement incentives. “I wish I could take credit for it, but I’ve got to give it to the guys that did it. It could have been so much worse had the previous administration not looked ahead and did what they did so we can minimize the impact on residents.”

The board also reaped savings of about $155,000 in early retirement incentives. The union employee contract runs through 2012.