Equity in paying for elections costs

Historically, towns have paid the cost of elections. This was transferred to the county in 2006 following the federal Help America Vote Act. In December 2009, county legislators voted to budget a revenue line of $988,395 to be collected from the county’s 22 towns and cities for their election costs. Who pays concerns all levels of government.

Substantial arguments can and have been made about whether it was just for the county to bill the towns. It’s a fair criticism. As this vote preceded my tenure in the Legislature, I withhold commentary on the merits but focus instead on making sure that means of collecting is fair and reasonable. Charging for election costs sounds simple. In practice it’s anything but.

As chairman of the Legislature’s Elections Oversight Committee, my goal was to develop a formula that is equitable. State election law allows counties to charge towns for the cost of elections. Yet, only three counties currently do so. St. Lawrence County charges for the complete cost of the Board of Elections, including full-time staff and overhead.

This seemed egregious for Dutchess when considering the BOE’s bloated manpower and salary structure. Erie County does a “chargeback†of the actual cost, but that number is not known for two years, meaning to do a chargeback we’d be billing for the 2008 presidential election, which had much higher costs than normal, not to mention to charge now would seem to be an ex post facto law. Schenectady County bypassed all this and just passed a new election property “tax.†Levying a new tax is not the answer.

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Not a single town budgeted the cost of elections into their 2010 budgets, meaning any election charge would result in town deficits. Therefore the Legislature also voted to add a sales tax to clothing for which the towns would share in the revenue (a projected $1.5 million) as a means for paying the new election costs. A problem arises, however, because the archaic sales tax formula distributes sales tax revenues with the prime choice cuts going to the cities in disproportionate shares, with the remainder being split between the towns based upon population.

Dividing equally by town would harm our small towns because with less population we end up paying more than we bring in! The same result is reached even for charging only for actual election costs.

A solution for 2010 is to reach the $988,395 using the sales tax formula in reverse, so that the cities will pay more for elections because they receive more in sales tax.

Using this formula that I am proposing, local sales tax revenue will more than pay for election costs for every municipality, such that every municipality will also receive a small sum of excess (unbudgeted) tax revenue. Then with dialogue with the supervisors and mayors, together we can determine the fairest collection formula for 2011 and beyond.

 Perhaps our next job then will be to reform the archaic sales tax system, thereby ending the preferential tax treatment given to cities at the expense of towns.

Michael Kelsey represents the towns of Amenia, Washington, Stanford, Pleasant Valley and the village of Millbrook in the Dutchess County Legislature. Write him at KelseyESQ@yahoo.com.