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SCHENECTADY
Official: New positions should net revenue
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    Plumbers beware: The city will start patroling next year to check for permits.
    One of the five new positions added to the proposed 2011 budget, a senior engineering facilities inspector, would likely bring in at least $87,000 more in permit fees by enforcing the law, Engineer Paul Cassillo said.
    He met with the City Council Thursday to go over his three “revenue-producing” new positions.
    The inspector, who would be paid $33,600, is intended particularly to crack down on workers who cut into the city streets without permits or without adhering to city standards.
    “We’ll be able to aggressively oversee and enforce all work in the city streets,” Cassillo said. “We are not collecting all the fees we should be collecting.”
    National Grid, Verizon and plumbers who need access to residential water and sewer lines all rip into the pavement and later patch it. Many of those patches fail, undermining the street and creating potholes. “We can do better cuts,” Cassillo said. “I call it, ‘Take back the streets.’ ” Cassillo’s other new additions are a second junior civil engineer, at a salary of about $40,600, and a principal design engineer, with a salary of $77,555. Those two would lead a new street maintenance division for the city. Current street workers would repave some of the city’s so-called “dirt” streets under their leadership.
    The workers and the new engineers would be paid through part of the $900,000 state CHIPS grant, which pays for some street paving every year.
    In essence, the grant would pay the salaries of many city workers who might otherwise be laid off. Currently the city gives its CHIPS money to contractors who pave the streets.
    They would still be hired for two-thirds of the paving funded by CHIPS. City workers would only repave dirt streets because they don’t have the experience or the equipment to do sidewalks. None of the dirt streets have sidewalks or curbs.
    “We need to walk before we can run,” Cassillo said. “We have a very small paver. There will be training in this, too.”
    But it will still provide an essential city service for less than it would cost to pay contractors.
    “They have to pay prevailing rate. For flagmen that’s probably $40. We can put ’em out there for $10 or $12,” Cassillo said.
    But he said the new division probably wouldn’t be able to pave more miles of streets than the contractors, even though their work will cost less than it would cost to hire a private company.
    That’s because some of the CHIPS grant will cover the salaries of the two engineers. They’re needed to design the paving plans, which involve rebuilding the foundation of each street, not simply patching the blacktop. They would also supervise the work.
    “Essentially we’re bringing CHIPS monies into the operating budget,” Cassillo said. “I did it in Dutchess [County]. Schenectady County does it.”
    He predicted the city would net $185,000 through CHIPS paying for city employee salaries.
    The engineers may also be able to bring in money for design work.
    “We can do smaller stuff in house. We can do Union Street streetscape design, things like that. We can do more for less,” Cassillo said.
    The city may be able to bill its design services to Metroplex and other agencies.
    “This gives you these other opportunities,” he said. “You have those options available to you.”
    Finance Commissioner Ismat Alam also told the City Council that if it created a tax collector position, the city would bring in at least another $100,000 from delinquent taxpayers.
    She based that figure on the success in Rochester, which employs a collector for the most difficult tax cases while selling easier tax liens to American Tax Funding. Schenectady also sells its easy liens to ATF for several million dollars every year, but ATF is unwilling to buy the diffi - cult cases. Those include owners who have died or moved away with no forwarding address.
    The tax collector would be paid $60,000 plus benefi ts.
    There are five new positions in the proposed budget, which also eliminates 89 jobs. The last new position, a body shop manager, has already been approved by the City Council.
    The body shop manager’s salary is $54,300. He is expected to bring in $131,406 in revenue next year, according to the mayor’s budget. That revenue would come from the county and surrounding suburbs that bring their vehicles to the body shop. Most of the body shop’s work would focus on rehabbing city vehicles, using current city workers who already have the training to remove rust and rebuild steel frames for the city’s plows and other badly eroded heavy equipment.....................>>>>.................>>>>.....................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r01100&AppName=1

So if I'm reading this right, Schenectady is going to use state grant $ (a $900,000 taxpayer paid for amount), to not only create 5 new positions, but to pay for other City employees salaries? Where's the taxpayer savings?

Seriously, not buying it.

Who gets stuck with the cost of all of the jobs when the grant money runs out?

You do. With one hand they close the Bellevue firehouse and layoff 19 fire fighters and then they add these positions. We don't need more Union St streetscapes. Another Metrograft disaster that did nothing to increase business. It so bad business owners had to put up "Still Open" signs. None of these positions will bring in half of what they project. More pie in the sky.

     Auto body position? The City needs to get out of the car business. All department heads should return their City vehicles. Mayor SOS needs to lead by example. The Fire/Police Chief need City vehicles-that's it. They are clueless about how to balance a budget. More and more sheeple are not going to pay anything. More foreclosures/less City revenue/more fire calls/more abandoned property.

Quoted from Shadow

Who gets stuck with the cost of all of the jobs when the grant money runs out?

You silly, tax money don’t run out, this is Schenectady County. You nickel and dime the taxpayer by justifying the increase and overstating the importance of the government positions by pre-empting the increase with the words "it only cost" like DVOR does with the REMS taxing district.  "It only cost $25 a year", opposed to $100K a year the Town would gain in revenue from Mohawk.  

The government leeches and bureaucrats are spreading their tentacles deeper and deeper and taking more and more control at all levels of government.  They are employing a growing number of political party members, pushing for taxing districts for non-profits with threats of political retribution by our emergency services (PBA), and using metroplex to garner support from private business.  

People in Schenectady County need to wake up!  We are almost to a point where your vote won't even matter on Election Day.  The Democrat Party will have enough people eating out of the government trough; the rest of us will be in the minority.

When I first saw this thread --- the first "position" that came to my mind was ----  "bend over and let
the tax person screw you"

So, they're actually planning on sending these people out to enforce laws?  Wow, what an original idea!  I wonder why they didn't think of this sooner.  The only problem is that a company like National Grid or Verizon will only roll over the fine that they receive from the county for breaking the law into the bills for the customers.  At least it will save Schenectady residents, as they will spread it over the entire spectrum of their customers, including Rotterdam residents, Niskayuna, and all other customers across the country.  Again, the city of Schenectady pushes it's bills off on others.

how about FUTURE PENSION/HEALTH INS for these workers???? because THIS is how we got where we are now....the F'EN entitlements of the public unions and taxpayer guranteed pensions.....on my back,your
back, our kids backs.....and the baggage just gets heavier and heavier and WITHOUT value to the taxpayer......like carrying a DEAD BODY on your back.......

government jobs equate to carrying a dead body on your back especially when there is no more value in the worker but entitlements to be paid out