Updated EIC Research on Shared Services and the Impact on the Town
Dear Edgemont Neighbors:
We continue working towards filing a petition to hold a vote on Edgemont’s incorporation as Greenburgh’s seventh village.
Since the EIC was formed in 2016, Greenburgh Supervisor Paul Feiner has repeatedly characterized Edgemont’s potential incorporation, and the resulting $18M tax revenue loss for the Town, as “devastating.” We have researched this topic for years and have recently updated our findings (available here).
To mitigate adverse impacts from Edgemont’s incorporation, the Town would need to exercise leadership and professionalism. Specifically, the Town could take two key steps to minimize incorporation’s effect on remaining unincorporated area residents.
Shared Services ($14M). The first step would be for the Town to negotiate contracts with the Village of Edgemont to provide many of the same major services that Edgemont currently receives from the Town, such as police, highway, sanitation, and library. Intergovernmental partnerships, supported by Mr. Feiner himself and common throughout New York State and nationally, would bring continuity of revenue to Greenburgh and continuity of service to both Greenburgh and the new Village of Edgemont.
Budget Alignment ($4M). As a next step, the Town could shift two expenditures–TDY Community Center and Greenburgh Nature Center (GNC)–from the unincorporated-only “B” budget to the Town-wide “A” budget into which the villages contribute. These departments provide services to the entire Town (including the existing villages), but currently only the unincorporated area provides tax support for their operations.
There is no reason why the unincorporated area of the Town should bear the entire financial burden for facilities and programs that are available to the entire Town; further, those departments deserve to enjoy the relative stability of Town-wide funding.
Of course, if the Town acted irresponsibly and did nothing, then it would only receive $2M from Edgemont Village for debt service.
*Please click here for detailed explanations and calculations.
We have been studying and advocating for these steps since we began our petitioning efforts in 2016. However, we have recently learned that representatives from our area plan to commission a third-party study of the topic, with a specific focus on incorporation’s possible impacts on the Town. We trust that a thorough, detail-oriented, third-party study would seek to answer the following questions:
Are the estimates of our proposed budgeted shared services and debt numbers reasonable?
Why would the Town of Greenburgh, as the incumbent provider of services to the Edgemont area, decline to share services with a newly formed Village of Edgemont (or any other village)?
Why hasn’t the Town followed previous recommendations made over the years from its own committees for budget alignment and efficiency, such as consolidation and privatization?
The Town plans to vote on funding a study this week. Although the legality of such a study has been called into question (see relevant Lohud article here), If the Town does fund this study, we hope it will be objective, looking at the most rational and obvious solutions for next steps in the event of incorporation, such as shared services and budget alignment. In the meantime, we suggest a quick glance at the attached informational document.
If you have not yet signed the third petition, please respond to this email, and we’ll send a volunteer to collect your signature. Please forward this notice to those you know who may also be interested.
To learn more about incorporation, visit our website or e-mail us with questions.
–The EIC
