Schenectady City Council passes $103 million budget with mayor's signature imminent

PHOTOGRAPHER: Peter R. Barber

Schenectady City Council members and Mayor Gary McCarthy discuss the 2023 City budget Wednesday night inside City Hall.

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SCHENECTADY — The Schenectady City Council passed a $103 million 2023 budget on Wednesday night and Mayor Gary McCarthy is poised to sign the plan in the coming days.

Following a marathon budget workshop held just six days before the city’s deadline to pass a budget, the council voted 5-2 to pass the plan Wednesday, with Councilwoman Doreen Ditoro and Councilman John Polimeni casting the dissenting votes.

The approved plan does not include a proposed 1% tax decrease that the council debated last week, with property taxes instead remaining flat at the mayor’s originally proposed level of $12.99 per $1,000 assessed home value.

The final plan eliminates the mayor’s original proposal to raise residents’ waste collection fees by $1 per week and also cuts the mayor’s proposed increases for water and sewer fees in half, with residents now expected to see a $6.50 increase annually for water fees and a $12.60 boost for sewer fees.

While McCarthy vowed on Tuesday to veto any potential budget that aligned with the council’s proposed plans to utilize city fund balance at the expense of federal American Rescue Plan Act funding to balance the budget, negotiations resulted in a compromise both sides could get behind.

“We’re in the realm of reality now,” McCarthy said following the budget’s passage. “I’m generally happy with it. There are some things in the capital budget that need tweaking, but we do that every year.”

The mayor said his signature on the council’s budget was imminent.

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“I’m pretty much going to sign this,” McCarthy said of the budget. “The only question is if the clerk [Samanta Mykoo] gets it to me tomorrow [Thursday] or the next day. Then we’ll get it back to the council a few days after that.”

During negotiations between the mayor, Schenectady Commissioner of Finance and Administration Anthony Ferrari, and Councilman John Mootooveren, the possibility was raised of utilizing some of the city’s $10.5 million in ARPA funding that had been set aside by the city to fund lost revenue in city budgets.

The approved budget includes $5.8 million in loss revenue ARPA funding and an additional $2.4 million in COVID-19 assistance ARPA funding. Following the appropriations for the 2023 budget, Mootooveren said the city will still have $10.1 million in ARPA funds remaining.

“Why were we not using it?” Mootooveren said of the decision to utilize the lost revenue ARPA funds. “I was able to highlight that with the mayor and to work that into the budget. The city is in a good financial position. We just need to continue to work together and build on our revenue.”

The final budget includes the utilization of $3.4 million in fund balance, a $141,005 decrease from McCarthy’s original proposal.

Following the passage of the budget, City Council President Marion Porterfield said she was satisfied with how the council had reached a compromise on the plan with the mayor’s office this week.

“It took some work and it took everybody coming together and saying, ‘We want to pass a budget,’” she said. “We want to be able to give our residents the best budget possible. I know everyone didn’t agree and it didn’t pass unanimously, and it was my hope that we would, but we didn’t get there. But we did have the majority of the council to vote yes on the budget.”

Polimeni said during the meeting that he couldn’t support the budget because he believed the city’s budgetary strategy was not sound in the long term because of the reliance on ARPA funding.

“I’m very concerned with the sustainability of this budget moving forward,” he said. “Unfortunately, this is typically how we do budgets, at least on my time being on the council. This budget is a snapshot in time and I think we really need to start considering our future budgets. This budget is such that I really don’t feel that we’re in a good position moving down the road.”

Ditoro said she felt it was the fiscally responsible decision to vote no on the spending plan, but Porterfield, Mootooveren and council members Damonni Farley, Carl Williams and Carmel Patrick joined together to approve the budget.

Mootooveren, who serves as the board’s finance committee chair, said he was happy to get the budget approved on Wednesday night.

“It was a healthy debate over the last couple of days and I think every council member had an opportunity to express themselves and ask questions and have them answered,” he said. “The budget is proposed by the mayor and we as a council have a duty to scrutinize the budget and to ask questions and to make adjustments. That’s what we’re here for, we were elected by the people to represent them.”

The $103,950,721 budget includes a $256,161 reduction in police overtime funding from the mayor’s proposal, a council change that Polimeni opposed. The plan will raise $31,629,000 in property taxes, in step with the proposed budget that the mayor unveiled in September that kept property taxes flat.

Mootooveren said during the meeting that he was convinced by Ferrari that it would be prudent for the council to drop a proposed 1% tax cut.

When asked to describe how the negotiations with the council played out over the last week, McCarthy replied, “I’d call the process painful.”