Lansing taxes reduced despite revenue shortfalls

Taxpayers in the town of Lansing will see their property taxes go down in 2021, from 2019’s $1.5435 per thousand to $1.5433 in 2021, according to the Town Budget for 2021. The decrease of.01% comes amid a 15% decrease in sales tax receipts.

All told, the budget appropriates $6,984,563.44 in spending for the year against the same amount in collections — sales and property taxes and fees. In 2020, spending and revenues were $7,218,757.29, or about 3.3% higher, with $92,688 of that coming from reserves.

Lansing Town Supervisor Ed LaVigne highlighted the decline in the town’s share of Tompkins County sales tax revenue as indicative of the headwinds the Board faced in assembling next year’s budget.

“Sales taxes were projected to go down by 15%,” LaVigne said. “In 2019, they were $1,660,000 plus, and for 2020, they’re projected to be $1,599,000 plus. And that’s 15% down.”

Eighty percent of sales tax revenues go to support the Highway Department, and 20% go to Codes and Planning, he said.

While the town dipped into reserve funds to support 2020 spending, LaVigne said that there are sufficient reserves remaining.

“The state comptroller recommends that towns have three months in reserve,” he said. “Right now, we have 4.8 to 5 months in reserve. The bottom line is that we are very healthy and can withstand the shortfall, or a bad year, like 1994, when we had to do more snowplowing.”

Councilperson Joe Wetmore agreed that “in the short term, there are plenty of reserves.” However, “we do no long-term planning,” he said.

“We should do a five-year plan,” he said. “We don’t foresee things that could converge and squeeze the town in ways that would be problematic. For example, … we approved a feasibility study into redoing the town barn. We took $40,000 from reserves. The project cost would be somewhere between $500,000 and $2 million, and we don’t have a projection of how that would affect the town’s reserves.”

Repair or replacement of the Town Highway Department’s building, known generally as the “town barn,” would be the subject of information sessions and public hearings in the coming months, according to LaVigne.

The project would probably not begin until at least 2022, LaVigne said.

“Nothing is set in concrete,” he said.

The feasibility study approved Nov. 18 would outline four options for the structure, ranging from repairing the building and installing a sprinkler system to its complete replacement, on the barn’s current site or in a new location.

LaVigne said that the project might cost as much as $5 million and would probably be financed through bonds.

“The town barn was cobbled together over 50 years, and we’ve outgrown it,” Wetmore said. “It has issues. For example, there are no sprinklers, and we need to protect the equipment. That’s why I could support it.”

Still, Wetmore is concerned that Lansing has “limited resources and there is a limit to how much we can tax the population.”

“Each individual idea is a great one, but we have no process to pick which one to do if we can’t afford to do all of them,” he said.

Councilperson Andra Benson said that the Town Board considered the 2021 budget “very carefully.”

“We were well aware of all the problems facing our economy due to the pandemic,” she said. “All the departments of our town government did an excellent job presenting their parts of the budget. Depending on their projected revenue sources — fees, sales tax, town taxes — they adjusted their projected spending, many keeping it at 2020 levels or reducing it substantially. Plus, the town has a healthy reserve fund and thus our 2021 tax rate declined.”

LaVigne said that taxes have gone up $.05 per thousand over the last five years, and that includes losing the power plant.

“I think it’s because of good business practices and good value,” he said. “We budget revenue low and expenses high, and we have great people working for us.”