Onondaga County 2025 Budget Public Hearing

To learn more about Onondaga County’s budget, I created some resources on cnysolidarity.org.

Here are my comments on the county’s 2025 budget:

I have gone through this year’s budget and I believe we can do better. From what I see, this is the status quo. Not much change from last year’s budget and our problems continue to go unaddressed. We have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the country. Homelessness continues to increase in our community and people have nowhere to go. We will keep managing, surviving but this budget doesn’t help us thrive. 

I am glad to see Children & Family Services is proposed to get an additional 16 positions. However Children & Family Services and many other departments have a lot of unfilled open positions. What is the county doing to get these positions filled, to retain staff? Does the county pay enough, how are working conditions? 

For the last 6 years the county has ended the year with a surplus. Onondaga County has over $200 million in reserves, 26% of the general fund revenue. 15% is the county’s goal for a healthy reserve. You have millions in reserves you could use to fund more services for residents, build housing for people, add additional staff for our board of elections, have consistent hours for our libraries across the county and so much more.

There is nothing in the budget for the aquarium which I find odd but strongly agree not one more penny of taxpayer dollars should go towards it. The latest bid for construction has come in at $57.4 – $67.8 million putting the aquarium costs at $19 – $30 million OVER budget.

Please cancel the aquarium! It’s not too late. We can use the funds that have not been spent yet to build public housing for families! We should not be wasting valuable time and resources looking for private donations of millions of dollars to house fish when we do not have enough housing for people in our own communities! Let’s build housing for families with our taxpayer dollars, not a prison for fish!

This legislature can add an amendment to the budget that moves the remaining aquarium funds into a fund to build housing. I hope one of you makes that motion, takes actions to address actual issues facing Onondaga County residents and help us thrive instead of barely getting by.

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