ALBANY COUNTY — The county’s municipalities have voted to accept an updated Albany County Shared Services and Property Tax Savings Action Plan, while also deciding to wait until next year to re-submit it to the state.

Participating towns, villages, and school districts have until Dec. 31, 2019, to decide which of the now 11 shared-services proposals they wish to participate in.

“Given the amount of interest that has recently been shown, it’s in the interest of Albany County taxpayers to re-submit and get a higher match from the state next year,” said James Malatras, president of the Rockefeller Institute, who has been shepherding the plan, at a meeting of municipalities on Friday, Sept. 14.

Malatras told The Enterprise last week, that the original plan had been approved and submitted to the state, but it was then withdrawn after more municipalities wanted to share in the savings.

The state has set aside $225 million for its County-Wide Shared Services Initiative.

By voting to wait until 2019, municipalities, if they have undertaken any of the plan’s cost-saving measures, won’t receive any state-matching funds, Malatas told The Enterprise this week. But they will still see savings because they have split the cost of the service with another municipality.

The municipalities voted on the amended plan as whole, Malatras said; they were not voting to do everything the plan says, only the proposals that they choose to participate in.

The amended plan contains three new proposals that, when combined with the original eight and fully implemented, is expected to save Albany County taxpayers $10.2 million annually.

The first of the new proposals is to have county-wide requests for proposals for solar-energy equipment to improve municipalities’ buying power. The updated shared-services plan projects savings of $225,000 annually.

This proposal is modeled on Schenectady County’s county-wide solar farm RFP, which has a goal for the county and all participating municipalities to produce 100 percent of their electricity from solar energy by Dec. 31, 2021. Schenectady County’s shared-service plan projects half-a-million dollars in annual savings.

The Albany County plan also notes that Bethlehem installed a 3.75-megawatt solar system that saves the town $150,000 annually.

The second new proposal recommends allowing municipalities access to a $45 million anaerobic digester facility — which turns food scraps into energy — to be built in Menands that Albany and Saratoga counties will share.

Annual savings are estimated to be $250,000.

The third new proposal is for savings in record-keeping. Albany County recently purchased a Laserfiche scanner, Malatras said, and has been in discussions with some of the larger municipalities to digitize municipal records. If this process is used county-wide, savings could total $500,000 annually.

For digitizing records, Malatras said, Tompkins County has been a model.

Tompkins County, with Ithaca as the county seat, in the Finger Lakes region, about 160 miles west of Albany County along Interstate 88, is the only county in the state to have adopted a shared-services plan. Tompkins County’s plan has been a model for many of the proposals in Albany County’s plan.

Malatras said that digitizing records would save on storage space, which has been a major concern for some municipalities; the process has also allowed municipalities to provide better service for residents.

In Tompkins County, Malatras said, digitizing municipal records has saved $5 million to $7 million; every municipality and school district in the county signed on to the process, he added.

Tompkins County has about one-third of the population of Albany County, Malatras said, so, an electronic, centralized process could mean, potentially, millions of dollars in savings.

Health-care savings

The creation of a county health consortium, said Tom Cetrino of the Benjamin Center, at the Sept. 14 meeting, would be one of the biggest cost savers that the shared-services plan offers. The Benjamin Center, on the State University of New York College at New Paltz campus, does governmental and business research and policy analysis.

The Albany County plan estimates $3 million in annual saving, which, Cetrino said, may be on the low side, as health-care costs continue to increase in the future. Annual savings, Cetrino said, could be as much as $5 million to $6 million, but the plan’s architects wanted a conservative estimate.

Every municipality and school district in Albany County, except the village of Ravena and the school districts of Bethlehem, Guilderland, Menands, and Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk, according to the updated plan, have agreed to join a county-wide health consortium.

Some school districts that are not joining the county consortium already realize savings through consortiums of school districts.

Cetrino said that, through the county consortium, municipalities could provide as good or better benefits than currently for less cost. One example of savings, he said, would be that municipalities in the consortium would no longer have to pay a broker to purchase insurance, which accounts for about 4 percent of the premium, the amount paid each month for insurance.

“That administrative structure,” Cetrino said, “you will find, is much leaner than what municipalities are currently paying for; that has been the experience for Tompkins County.” Albany County will follow Tompkins County’s successful plan, Cetrino added.

“It took Tompkins County five years to get its health consortium on line,” Cetrino said; he hopes that Albany County can do it in three years.

“Albany County has advantages,” Cetrino said, “because Tompkins County started from nothing, and Albany County is starting where Tompkins County left off.”

Equipment savings

Malatras told The Enterprise that a number of municipalities had wanted more time to think about purchasing equipment.

Some municipalities were under the impression that they would be receiving much more in state-matched funds for equipment purchases — in the neighborhood of half the cost — than is actually being offered.

Malatras provided The Enterprise with the Department of State’s guidance on the issue:

“One-time costs and one-time savings are to be reasonably amortized. For example, if a shared services agreement requires a one-time cost of $500,000 for purchasing equipment that is expected to last 10 years, the savings would only be reduced by $50,000 — reflecting one-tenth of the cost.

“Conversely, if a shared services agreement would enable a one-time savings of $500,000 by not having to purchase equipment that is expected to last 10 years, the savings should only be $50,000 — reflecting one-tenth of the savings for the applicable match year only.”

Who gets the savings?

What is still not known, and has to be agreed upon, is how the savings from shared services will be apportioned among the municipalities and school districts.

What was discussed last year — and seems to be what will happen — is that only municipalities that participate in specific proposals would split the savings, based on some mutually agreed-upon formula.