Danielle Brody, Westchester County Business Journal
County executives from Westchester, Putnam and Rockland agree that state government often impedes progress, pointing to the State Environmental Quality Review Act as a prime example.
Westchester County Executive Robert Astorino said the environmental law needs to be overhauled because the restrictive review delays new projects. SEQRA requires the approving governmental body to mitigate the environmental impacts of development proposals.
“It’s become a lawyer’s delight and has become a bludgeoning tool to stop anything and everything,” Astorino said at a leadership conference April 20 sponsored by Hudson Valley Pattern for Progress and held at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Tarrytown.
He said often it is not worth it for developers to wait years and spend millions for the complex environmental review if their project might not go anywhere.
Putnam County Executive MaryEllen Odell agreed with Astorino about SEQRA. “Sometimes people walk away from good projects.” She said counties could be more business-friendly by having someone available to help developers with the process.
Astorino said state and county agencies should have a time limit to give answers about projects. “It’s so open-ended you could have no answer for years.”
All executives also touched on the challenging makeup of Hudson Valley government, which has overlapping towns and jurisdictions.
“If we were recreating New York again we wouldn’t create it the way it was created,” Astorino said.
Towns should look for ways to combine services, he said, which would save money. He said the town of Ossining saved money by making a deal with the county to provide police services for four years. Now they have joined with the village of Ossining.
He said this year’s county budget might be the most difficult he’s faced in six years. He said he is looking at ways to cut items in the budget to avoid increasing taxes. “I’d rather squeeze county government more than I squeeze taxpayers and business.”
He said he wants to reorganize posts at the county Department of Correction since the population of prisoners has decreased, but the state won’t allow it, he said.
“We’re stuck trying to do things and being told no by the state.” County government is a “huge ATM” for the state, he said.
The other executives also agreed the state government contributes to the financial challenges faced by counties. Odell said the state is known to mishandle money, especially the recent nearly $6 billion windfall that came from legal settlements with financial institutions. She said most of the money was misdirected and not going toward remedying the state’s “deplorable” infrastructure.
Rockland County Executive Ed Day said money that should be going to highway funds is not going there. He said when he calls the Department of Transportation it claims there isn’t enough money or manpower to fix the roads. He said raising gas taxes is not an answer, especially because residents would fill up in neighboring New Jersey.
Odell said the mentality in New York is always to add another tax.
“The federal government wastes so much money,” Astorino said. “If they prioritized we could cut taxes left and right.”
He said in 2009, the stimulus bill allocated $40 million for social services for two years. When the funding ended and the county had to support the program, funds had to be taken away from other programs. He said the recent Raise the Age movement, an initiative to raise the age of adult criminal responsibility in New York state from 16 to 18, was originally included in the budget. It would cost about $40 million for new lawyers and probation officers.
“Nobody thought about that,” he said.
Day said Raise the Age sounds wonderful in theory, yet politicians should do a cost-benefit analysis. “Stop before you put something into policy,” he said.
