I voted in favor of the County Executive’s proposal to amendment to the inter-municipal agreement between the County of Chemung and the City of Elmira for Delinquent Tax Collection and Foreclosure money to be advance to the City Of Elmira to help with their 2026 budget. I did this for the soul reason that the agreement requires the city to agree to submit a formal application for the timely initiation of a Comprehensive Review by the New York State Financial Restructuring Board (“FRB”).
The city needs to get its fiscal house in order and hopefully, this review will help them in that process.
I also support the city taking back the responsibility of paying the salaries of their DPW workers. The county has been paying the salaries for the city since 2015. It was an agreement between the county and city to help ease the burden of the county’s change of the sales tax formula that gave less to the city and all municipalities in the county.
Ten years later, the county cannot continue to bear the burden of the 1.5 million dollar expense. The county has proposed a city take over of the salaries over a four to five year period. It is not fair to the other municipalities throughout the county who also lost money with the new sales tax formula in 2014 with the county’s fiscal restructuring plan. The county will continue to pay the fringe benefits to the tune of $500,000.
Below is the Route slip that came to the legislature regarding the agreement and the agreement that the legislature voted on at it’s Feb. 9th meeting.
Route Slip (1) 1st Amendment to Tax Foreclosure IMA 2026 (1)