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TEXT 7: County Services

 

Counties do not provide all of their services evenly across municipal boundaries. County roads, for example, are maintained by counties except within city limits, where cities generally provide maintenance. It is also not uncommon for county sheriffs to patrol and provide police service in rural towns, but not in cities, villages or other inner-ring suburbs, where local police forces exist. When the cities and villages represented islands of service provision, and concentrations of population and wealth, this approach made great sense. The question raised by the preceding analysis, as well as by growing fiscal problems in cities and villages, is—does it today? Today city property owners did not receive the same level of service from their counties relative to property owners in towns; examples included provision of law enforcement, highway and public park services. A majority of the survey respondents said their county did not provide sheriff services (55 percent) or highway services (65 percent) within the city, and the county did not own and operate a park or recreational facility within 78 percent of surveyed cities.

 

Municipal Aid

Revenue sharing and many other varieties of aid to local governments are differentiated based on municipal class. To a large extent, this has been helpful to city governments, which often receive greater aid, and are generally facing greater needs than an “average” town or village. While the original statutory revenue-sharing formulas have long been ignored in annual State budgets, cities continue to receive far greater aid than towns or villages. Large urban towns such as Islip and Cheektowaga continue to receive much less municipal State aid than they would if classified as cities, 10 while facing many “urban” problems that in some cases are in much higher proportion than those experienced in more affluent cities, such as Rye and Saratoga Springs.

 


Date: 2015-01-12; view: 864


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TEXT 6: Governance | DIVISION OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT SERVICES & ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT / Municipal Structures
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