By Associated Press
Buffalo, NY – Erie County spent the week paring its payroll as a $108 million budget shortfall continued to shape the county's future.
By Friday, county leaders had identified more than 1,600 jobs to be cut, while other layoffs remained tied up in court.
Lawmakers were under a judge's order to reconsider funding cuts that could halve sheriff's road patrols and close three of four DMV offices, as well as cuts to the county comptroller and district attorney's offices.
The Erie County Medical Center, meanwhile, was awaiting a court ruling on reductions the hospital says threaten its burn unit and trauma center.
State Supreme Court Judge Joseph Makowski has given the Legislature until Thursday to submit a balanced budget. In the meantime, he ordered department heads challenging the cuts to spell out for the Legislature which of their duties are mandated and how much they cost.
Although the picture of what upstate's most-populous county will look like in 2005 continues to evolve, some apparent certainties have emerged:
-- The county will operate with about 2,000 fewer positions.
-- The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra will be on stage less often.
-- Roads will be snow-covered for longer as a shrunken public works department takes longer to plow them.
-- County parks will remain closed for the rest of the year barring intervention from host communities concerned the golf courses will go to seed.
-- The orchestra, Buffalo Zoo, science museum, Studio Arena Theatre and Albright-Knox Art Gallery will receive some funding, but 42 smaller cultural institutions will not. The orchestra this week canceled five performances amid financial uncertainty.
Faced with the $108 million cash shortfall for 2005, County Executive Joel Giambra had hoped a sales tax increase would let him avoid the deep cuts now affecting virtually every county department and service. But his proposal to raise the tax from 8.25 percent to 9.25 percent was shot down by county lawmakers, who said they were heeding demands from constituents who saw too much county fat.
Giambra blames escalating state-mandated Medicaid and pension costs for the county's financial problems, which in the past have been plugged with now-depleted reserves and other temporary fixes.
Factory owner Jack Davis on Friday said the cause goes deeper, to the continued loss of jobs from an area that never recovered from decades-old manufacturing losses, particularly in the steel industry.
"I don't disagree that we did have a lot of fat in the budget, we have a lot of political employees on the payroll ... but even if those were all solved, we'd still have a problem," said Davis, whose company makes heating elements.
"If we had a steel industry here we would not have a budget issue, because there was fat and political appointees and inefficiencies back then," said Davis, who founded the Save American Jobs Association to lobby for tariffs on imports and a pullout from free trade agreements.