Data to present on October 30th

[xTheKatx]

Like many people I saw at the town hall last night, I am equally as outraged by a few comments made from our board. I came there with a prepared statement, however my exact statement was echoed by Mr. Clarke first so I did not get up and speak.

Regardless of anything said there has got to be points proven and without a group effort we will never be able to have multiple people get up and talk.

First, I was outraged that for roughly 45 minutes there was a independent gentleman telling us basically " well West Seneca has used all of its funds, therefore you are now in the position you are in" The response we got from our board put the icing on the cake for me. "Over the years I have proposed multiple increases less in severity which has all been turned down by my fell councilmen" I believe those words to almost be exact.

1) If they wanted me to be educated on this, they should have put that point out well in advance and made sure it was heard and understood.
2) I am someone who does not sit ideally by when I am challenged to become an expert and circumvent or collaborate with the people or positions we have elected to be those experts for us.

----If the council wants us to all of sudden become the experts in the town's budget where they were elected to be then there needs to be comparisons and we need to come with suggestions......and not just suggestions but solutions and demands.

I am going to start with one thought for this thread, and I do have many however I was driving into work this morning and I would like to know if anyone has any knowledge of the size of other town municipalities. I am talking employee size. I want to address a comparison to the size of other various towns population (west Seneca is 44,000 roughly according to G. Hart). We have 450 employees. (All of which according to the council last night receive benefits.) If they want to see a savings in healthcare costs which apparently now the town residents need to fund 100% of any cost that does not get put onto the employees then simply put, the size of West Seneca's government needs to be equal to that of other towns in our area. Now I am referring to like towns, both bigger and smaller than ours. With similar/same services. Not radical examples. This point needs to be addressed logically.

Does anyone know where you can readily get the above information? Please post other ideas about last night. Please make them constructive.

I will be there on October 30th ready to speak with numbers, if this is what they want, then in my mind we need to give it to them and give it to them where it counts. This is hopefully my first point of many. I am hoping to help anyone else further a speaking point they wish to make too.


To the gentleman who spoke of reassessment and incorporation. I would really like to hear your research so I could echo a statement if your research becomes true.

Thank you

[WNYresident]

Some research

http://seethroughny.net/

This site only displays base salary. Benefits/health insurance cost/pension contributions are not included.


http://seethroughny.net/payrolls/towns


Choose the year and your town.



WSFirst,

Do you have the numbers for current health insurance costs and pension contributions per employee? This way property owners can add that to the base salaries to see the true salary package?

[Electric Eye]

Cheektowaga has approx 440 employees and approx 75K residents

I recommend you DEMAND the town forms a Citizen Budget Advisory committee.

Ask for or Foil the 2016 Actual Budget numbers and the adopted Budget numbers

Ask for the 2017 adopted budget numbers

Ask for the 2018 proposed budget numbers

Compare 2016 adopted to actual, compare 2016 actual to 2017 adopted, ACTUAL will show what was actually spent or not. Then compare the actual with 2017 adopted and 2018 proposed will show what they are asking for.

Ideally you should look at all numbers for the last 5 adopted budgets and the last actual which should be 2016.

I find the budget numbers provided online are too vague, you need more detail but not so much you know what each folder cost.

[WSFirst]

1.jpg

Per DTWarren's sheets. Debt and General Gov't are the two biggest increases

[WSFirst]

Some research

http://seethroughny.net/

This site only displays base salary. Benefits/health insurance cost/pension contributions are not included.


http://seethroughny.net/payrolls/towns


Choose the year and your town.



WSFirst,

Do you have the numbers for current health insurance costs and pension contributions per employee? This way property owners can add that to the base salaries to see the true salary package?

No, I only have the data that we contribute. I did post the amount each person recevies which is on seethroughny
http://seethroughny.net/pensions/56391632

Untitled.jpg

[gorja]

The 2010 census had West Seneca at 44,711 and Lancaster at 41,604
I don't know how many employees the Town of Lancaster but the population number includes the Village of Lancaster and the portion of Depew that lies in Lancaster. So the employees would have to be included from the Lancaster village and part of Depew's.

Here's Lancaster's tentative budget
http://www.lancasterny.gov/index.php...ve-budget/file

[xTheKatx]

After thoroughly looking at the seethrough NY website I think I have a very good idea in terms of what data I would like to focus on. I personally am going to take and compare the following for multiple surrounding towns:
town census
employee salary less than 30K
employee salaray between 30- 50K
employee salary over 50 K

I will include actual numbers and graph the same data to include a ratio of employee per 100 residents of the town. I will also graph each individual data point I listed above.

My thought and please add or correct me if I am off base here but supervisor was quoted to saying we had approximately 450 FTE and PTE employees. The independent analyst which spoke for 45 minutes seemed like and basically said almost verbatim "the council has its back against the wall and there is no other choice, unless the residents can come up with 2.9 million in savings or revenue." If this is seriously the case then enough is enough the residents need to have their eyes open about these figures. I would love to ask if a part time employee is allowed to receive the same benefits as a full time employee. If that is the case I would estimate employee benefits at about $16,000 per employee. It could honestly be higher.

I arrived at the above figure with the following thought process. If you take 6.5 million which was estimated on the screen for total health care and divide that by 450 then you get $14444.44, therefore that is just healthcare only. I have thought modestly here that the rest of all benefits should amount to roughly an additional $1500.

So if employee levels are opened to the public and presented in the manner I am proposing you could in theory state that a refinement of every department needs to occur. She said that the government is doing more with less, well when it comes to safety of officers or fire or highway I can see an expenditure but for office workers, clerical workers....etc If you eliminate 100 workers who make 50,000 or less that would amount to 5 million dollars in just salary, on top of that if you add in the benefits you would have an additional 1.6 million.

Do I think this could fully occur, maybe not to the extremes I am stating here, but if these figures are not put out for citizens to realize and the town to digest the fact that its residents know what is driving costs it will never. Comparing to the other towns is a bonus. It puts fuel to the fire because it gives a backboard for other citizens to compare to, and a graph will speak a thousands words for many. I don't believe I will be able to display the graphs electronically but I will print out a lot of them to circulate.

I will exclude safety personnel(police and fire) I don't believe we should be tackling that right now, and I wouldn't know what points to make.

Let me know thoughts as I start preparing this for the 30th.

[WNYresident]

I arrived at the above figure with the following thought process. If you take 6.5 million which was estimated on the screen for total health care and divide that by 450 then you get $14444.44, therefore that is just healthcare only. I have thought modestly here that the rest of all benefits should amount to roughly an additional $1500.

I think the $14,444 is too low. I was told at one time the Town of Cheektowaga the health care cost were over $20k per employee.

[xTheKatx]

I think the $14,444 is too low. I was told at one time the Town of Cheektowaga the health care cost were over $20k per employee.

I was thinking it is a low ball estimate, but if you go high on every figure people will suspect you are being too grandiose. Currently the cost of a premium per month for a really good health plan is around 1700 a month to 1800 a month. I guess without knowing what plan the town has and what the monthly premium negotiated actually is it is hard to figure out if I should increase that number. Therefore I said shooting in the middle low value may be beneficial.

[WNYresident]

Best course of action is to find out true approximate figure. One of the board members including the Supervisor should know approximately what that figure is for family versus single individual plans.

[Electric Eye]

Best course of action is to find out true approximate figure. One of the board members including the Supervisor should know approximately what that figure is for family versus single individual plans.

Get the detailed 2016 "ACTUAL" budget, This will include the REAL numbers for 2016, not the guesses used for the "Proposed" budget, that are then transferred to the "Adopted" budget.

You really don't know how important those ACTUAL budget number are to the problem without them in your hand.

[WSFirst]

There is nothing West Seneca residents can do about the current situation. The can has been kicked down the road. Taxes will only continue to go up. The only solution is bankruptcy. There are many reasons why the town should but won't file bankruptcy. Allegedly the union and the town are meeting with the mediator. It's my understanding, the town workers need to agree to the new contract regardless of the decision or recommendation of the mediator. Why would they give up anything to a weaker contract?

This is what happens when the Central Banks push ZIRP and NIRP policies for YEARS. Most of these state pension plans assume an insane 8% year over year rate of return. They are more underfunded than anyone even can fathom. What about Other Post-Employment Benefits (OPEB) that most taxpayer likely didn't even know existed? No one talks about OPEB, New York is less than 1% funded according to a study from Pew Charitable Trusts that are future payments that have been promised to retirees primarily to cover healthcare costs.

1. Current salaries
2. Curent pension contributions (% of the actual amount)
3. Other Post-Employment Benefits (health care)

Anyone attending the meeting on the 30th, please ask the following questions because you can't do anything about the 16, 17 expenses and maybe they only raise taxes 6% this year after the uproar;

1. Will anyone on the board take a pay cut, the same percentage as the tax increase?
2. What is the plan to reduce taxes in '19 and '20 assuming the healthcare and all "mandates" stay in place?

Bankruptcy is the only solution in my opinion with Taylor Law.

[xTheKatx]

There is nothing West Seneca residents can do about the current situation. The can has been kicked down the road. Taxes will only continue to go up. The only solution is bankruptcy. There are many reasons why the town should but won't file bankruptcy. Allegedly the union and the town are meeting with the mediator. It's my understanding, the town workers need to agree to the new contract regardless of the decision or recommendation of the mediator. Why would they give up anything to a weaker contract?

This is what happens when the Central Banks push ZIRP and NIRP policies for YEARS. Most of these state pension plans assume an insane 8% year over year rate of return. They are more underfunded than anyone even can fathom. What about Other Post-Employment Benefits (OPEB) that most taxpayer likely didn't even know existed? No one talks about OPEB, New York is less than 1% funded according to a study from Pew Charitable Trusts that are future payments that have been promised to retirees primarily to cover healthcare costs.

1. Current salaries
2. Curent pension contributions (% of the actual amount)
3. Other Post-Employment Benefits (health care)

Anyone attending the meeting on the 30th, please ask the following questions because you can't do anything about the 16, 17 expenses and maybe they only raise taxes 6% this year after the uproar;

1. Will anyone on the board take a pay cut, the same percentage as the tax increase?
2. What is the plan to reduce taxes in '19 and '20 assuming the healthcare and all "mandates" stay in place?

Bankruptcy is the only solution in my opinion with Taylor Law.

My plan will still continue to everything I posted so far. There is no way to convince someone you can file for bankruptcy. It would take the entire town to understand what the other implications of that are. If I can personally affect 2019 and 2020 that will make me feel good, honestly I get it is probably much to late to affect the fact that there cannot be a tax increase in 2018 but going forward everyone needs to be working to create attention on west Seneca holding them accountable. I surely will, my wife and I have decided it is not a wish of ours to move and run away from the town we moved to 5 years ago. My kids are happy in general in our home and life is good.

Can you explain your history and knowledge of Taylor Law a little?

[Electric Eye]

Can you explain your history and knowledge of Taylor Law a little?

Everything you need to know about the Taylor law: Condensed version https://www.goer.ny.gov/GOER_Information/Taylor_Law.cfm

Detailed version: http://www.perb.ny.gov/stat.asp

[xTheKatx]

Everything you need to know about the Taylor law: Condensed version https://www.goer.ny.gov/GOER_Information/Taylor_Law.cfm

Detailed version: http://www.perb.ny.gov/stat.asp

Thank you a read the quick version of the law. I planned to look it up but just hadn't had the time yet.