The recommended minimum for unassigned funds is two months' operating expenditures, which for Hudson is $2,623,614. Calculating according to the requirements of New York State Comptroller's Office, Hudson's unassigned fund balance at the end of 2025 was $1,409, 849. Commenting on the situation, Morris said, "If that was being looked at by the comptroller, there's a very good likelihood that in next year's report of cities under stress, with those numbers, that we will be considered a city under stress."
Morris also told the Council that "in the first pass" of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment's review of the budget for 2027, there is a more than $1.5 million gap between projected revenues and requested expenditures. In the past, such budget gaps have been closed by taking money from the fund balance. It appears that won't be possible this time.
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A number of us have been harping on this issue for a long time . . . seemingly to ourselves. It's high time the Council heard it. Let's hope they take it to heart.
ReplyDeleteThe silver lining here is that the City will be forced into a hard look at its expenditures and revenues. Increasing property taxes will only raise rents for the vast majority of renters and further exacerbate the stratification of Hudson society. Fiscal responsibility may actually take hold for the first time in a long time. A property reval would be the first place to start so at least we're on an equitable footing.
The key is of course to control spending but, at the same time, the City has to consider its revenue sources and figure out a demand-neutral method of increasing revenues without further burdening property owners.
Hard to imagine that Hudson's fund balance is only a third of what Greenport's is currently, especially when considering what a clusterfuck that town has been for several years now.
ReplyDeleteA trend I am seeing with municipal budgets in NY State is that a lot of the growth is coming through health insurance and it seems that's a juggernaut that can't be stopped. Currently, a municipality that wants to keep its budget flat has to cut services to keep up with rising health insurance premiums plus inflation.
I am curious if Hudson can avoid a property tax increase next year. Greenport has but it's dipping into its various fund balances right now.
Health insurance premiums have been rising substantially faster than inflation for more than 20 years. Most healthcare costs are contractual in the sense that the obligation for the municipality to provide coverage arises from the contract with its employees (CSEA union and collective bargaining) which also mandate contributions to retirement plans. The stock market when its growing shields municipalities at least partially from increases in retirement costs (since the contributions are bundled by the NYS Comptroller’s office and invested in the market). So we've all benefitted from Wall Streets bullishness over the past 5 years. When that trend reverses (and it always does), additional budgetary strain will arise.
ReplyDeleteClearly, municipalities must be creative in their revenue generation. Property taxes generally only cover about 25% of a municipal budget. But as federal and state spending growth slows, additional pressures will devolve to the towns and cities as both have traditionally bolstered muni coffers.
Voters need to come to grips with the need to elect creative, thoughtful and capable council and town board members. Ideology wont solve this problem — left, right, doesn't matter. Thinkers and doers are what is required.
Greenport is fun to watch for entertainment purposes (at least for now). But it can only avoid paying its own way as long as the city it leeches from can afford to overspend to its neighbors’ benefit (and those days ended years ago even if Hudson still spends like a drunken sailor). The same goes for the other surrounding communities that have no youth department or programming, no library, no public schools, government or utility installations occupying valuable real estate while generating no property tax revenues.
Until the fundamental budgetary pressures and revenue restrictions are systemically addressed at the state level, NYS municipalities will continue to be beaten between the countervailing needs of their exhausted tax base and the desire/need to provide their employees a middle class existence.
It's actually not true that Greenport has no youth programming. It dedicates around $70k in the tentative budget of 2027 to youth.
DeleteWe actually have a sort of shared services agreement with Stockport which allows Stockport parents to enroll their children in our summer camp but they only have to pay the Greenport residents rate of $100/kid/week while the Town of Stockport comes up with the additional $75/kid/week.
Greenport is really not leeching off Hudson to the degree you think it does. You also have to factor in stuff like the Wellness Hub that is overwhelmingly not super-popular here because it's designed to benefit Hudson rather than Greenport residents.
So Hudson and Greenport roughly the same size... but Hudson spends ~$1m and Greenport less ~$100k on youth programming.
DeleteNo Max. You're wrong at least about the Wellness Hub. It's meant to benefit those in Columbia County who need its services. And by conflating "Columbia County" as you clearly are with "Hudson," you kind of make my point. Oh, and by the way, how many businesses in Greenport say "we're in Greenport," not "we're in Hudson?"
DeleteIn reality, future residents of the Wellness Hub currently reside in Hudson proper because that's where the services are: DSS, Salvation Army, hospital, other stuff. Greenport offers none of these services and most of the rest of the county don't either.
DeleteNot quite sure I understand the bit about businesses saying they're in Greenport vs in Hudson. One quirk of Greenport is that we don't have a post office because our name clashes with the Village of Greenport out on Long Island. That's why our mailing addresses say Hudson and not Greenport. I don't know if our businesses ever spoke out on whether they are in Greenport or in Hudson.
Max, think this through with me: if the only place in the county that offers services are in Hudson and they are available to residents of the entire county, then those receiving the services are, in fact, from all over the county. And all Greenport is doing by being the situs of the Hub, finally and perhaps for the first time in recent memory, is accepting that it too has some responsibility for seeing to the county's neediest. And how much is the town foregoing in property tax revenue to house these folks on charming Industrial Tract? Why, it must be about a whopping $3k a year.
DeleteI would have responded to your post earlier but I was at the Hudson branch of TD Bank . . . in Greenport.
Max -
Deletere: "You also have to factor in stuff like the Wellness Hub that is overwhelmingly not super-popular here because it's designed to benefit Hudson rather than Greenport residents."
Greenport is not paying for the Wellness Hub. The entire county and private benefactors are...
I fully understand your reasoning and it wasn't lost on me before either. But Greenport is also not a city and it doesn't have the same legal agency that Hudson has. We can never provide Hudson's services because we don't have the same legal standing that would allow us to create revenue in the way Hudson does.
DeleteNor in fact the political personnel. Something that Hudson can do, namely enact a city-wide speed limit of 25 mph for example, is probably already beyond the capacity of our town board.
The issue with the Wellness Hub is that it could have just as well been built somewhere in Ancram or Hillsdale. But that's not where it's going. It goes to Greenport because thanks to our lack of zoning, anything goes and nothing can be prevented. And when once again comes to leeching off Hudson, we are also the ones that pay the price for having big-box stores that Hudsonians use while they clog up our portion of Fairview Avenue.
We don't even get to keep the sales tax that is being generated in Greenport because it's being distributed based on a formula that considers the size of the population. Hudson, by the way, has a special sales tax deal with the county that earns it an additional portion it would otherwise not be eligible for.
I was curious about Morris’s statement, as the comptroller’s office already has all of this data. The pdf linked to above is for fiscal year 2025 and is accurate as of 8/31/2026. Hudson’s fiscal year is the calendar year and we are not listed among the non-reporting municipalities.
ReplyDeleteThe least intense fiscal stress designation is “susceptible to fiscal stress”, and requires a “fiscal score” between 45 and 54. Hudson’s fiscal score, based on 2025 data, is 10.
Hudson is one of the worst performing on this ratio of all towns / cities in Columbia County... we have a piece on this soon.
ReplyDeleteAnd MB... the job, the fiduciary duty, of a municipality is to be reliable, boring, fiscally conservative.
There is no reason to fly close to the ground in a town where revenue is not very diversified, and the tax base is very concentrated.