As the time nears for developing a new village budget, let’s compare the tax rates the village board imposes.
By state law, water departments must charge “user fees” or “rents” to cover their costs, not taxes. Similarly, sewer departments must charge user fees, not taxes, to cover their costs of operations. And this is extremely helpful: by naming the water and sewer rents “fees” rather than “taxes”, everyone pays for these services; no-one is exempt.
Let’s see how that translates for us in Potsdam.
Rounding to the nearest dollar, I paid $525 in total in 2024 for water and for sewer fees. The final budget document on the village website shows that for 2023-2024, the water and sewer departments cost $3.3 million to operate. So I personally contributed 16 cents to every thousand dollars those two departments needed. Keep in mind that homeowners, businesses as well as nonprofits contribute to water and sewer fees. Let’s compare this to our property taxes that run the General Fund.
I paid $2,500 in village property taxes last year. The final 2024 budget document (posted on the village website) shows that the village board needed to raise $3.8 million in property taxes to operate its General Fund (i.e. DPW, the police department, civic center, parks & recreation etc). So I contributed 64 cents to every thousand dollars for village operations, a 4.0-fold increase compared to the water and sewer costs.
Why? Yes indeed, because in the village fewer than 1/3 of all property owners contribute to taxes. The total property value in the village, currently, before the new valuation kicks in, is listed by the county as $684 million. The total taxable property value in the village, however, stood at $222 million, or or 32% of the total.
Currently DPW, the second most expensive department within the General Fund, covers the cost of building, maintaining and repairing water and sewer lines. If those costs were instead carried by the water and sewer departments, everyone would end up contributing to the upkeep of our infrastructure, not just the property tax payers. A quick phone call or email to NYCOM counsel would quickly inform us of the legality of such an adjustment, which has the potential to significantly lower the tax burden on village residents. Join me in urging the Mayor and village staff to pursue this possibility, via emails, phone calls or attendance at village board meetings.
Local Government Matters 
I believe you’re not reading the budget correctly. Unless things have changed dramatically in the last ten years there are lines in the water and sewer funds for the salaries and benefits as they relate to water distribution and sewer collection. These are DPW salaries paid through water and sewer fees, not property taxes. So when DPW crews are out working on water and sewer lines, these salaries cover that. It used to cover about 4 FTE which is probably still a pretty fair distribution of labor considering the fewer hours DPW actually spends on water and sewer lines as compared to street and sidewalk maintenance.
Your last paragraph implies that DPW does not have salary lines in the water and sewer funds, and they always did, and I would think they still do.
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Thank you for your reply. You are correct that there is much in the budget that I do not understand. Your reply begins to resolve some confusion: When I asked WTP head Brian P. about particular WTP expenses, he sometimes replied that I should ask DPW head Greg T. about those items, and I (mis)understood those to be DPW expenses. Your reply corrects this view. It is nevertheless a useful distinction for tax payers to bear in mind, the difference between fees and taxes and how the cost burden is shared, no?
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