At 4:15 p.m. March 29, the County Executive will stand before a room full of elected officials, department heads, agency directors, community activists and others to deliver his State of the County. I believe his speech this year will be very interesting in light of recent developments.

The County Executive has publically stated that the “state of the county” is not good and we are facing an $18 million shortfall. I hope he will address this directly. Residents are tired of the politics, the blame game and being asked to fund schemes to fix government’s mistakes. I look forward to working with him and all of my colleagues to face the issues head on.

We actually knew about the budget shortfall before the 2017 budget was completed in December. The Executive chose to underfund a reoccurring expense to ECMC that helps pay for underinsured or uninsured patients. He budgeted $16.2M, despite knowing the payments in recent years have surpassed nearly $30M. This underfunding was raised as a concern by Legislators, the former assistant budget director said that the county could make this payment with undesignated fund balance, which is at $99 million, if necessary. Now, however, the County Executive has stated he will not support using fund balance to pay for the payments. It’s an interesting change in position.

The real issue is the $87 million in new spending added during his five years in office. We are facing the reality that he was wrong when he told Legislators that we could afford his budget plans. We can’t afford to keep spending as we have been so we need a new plan. A better plan, and one that brings all parties together to address the structural problems of our budget.

In my opinion, until last week, the County Executive was banking on one flawed plan. He wanted to get the county out of this current budget issue by getting money from ECMC to hide our budget problems. I do find it interesting that the county’s financial future depended on ECMC happening to need a new emergency room. For arguments sake, what was the County Executive’s plan if ECMC didn’t happen to need to borrow millions of dollars and wasn’t willing to credit the county for its payments to the hospital during the process?  Is he saying this solution (yet incredibly flawed and unfair to ECMC) magically fell in his lap? No plan B? He was told back in October 2016 that he needed a plan B as he didn’t have the necessary votes in the Legislature.

ECMC still plans to build its new ER and borrow the funds through alternative options they have laid out. With Erie County out of the picture, the overall project will cost less and ECMC will have more money available to them to invest in their needs. Now, with that aside, the needs the community that the county provides cannot be compromised. Shame on the County Executive for threatening services and allocated funding because he found himself in a tight spot. I receive calls daily about dangerous roadways that need to be fixed. However, the County Executive is once again treating public safety and other budget items like a bargaining chip.