ALBANY COUNTY — A study is beginning this month to map the workforce and services of all layers of municipal government from the county on down.

Its academic authors are expected to develop models that could lead to salary savings in local governments of an estimated $30 million over five years and help the towns and villages in Albany County collectively qualify their taxpayers for a second year of state-funded rebates.

The county comptroller’s office, which has requested the study, is tasked with getting local leaders on board.

Albany County Comptroller Michael Conners is hoping municipalities will be more eager to collaborate than in the past since the ante was upped with the tax-freeze plan in the 2015 state budget — if municipalities and school districts can reel in their levy increases, their taxpayers get a rebate equal to the increase, or the rate of inflation.

Most local municipal budgets passed for the 2015 fiscal year were under state-set limits, qualifying their residents for the rebates. For a repeat in 2016, municipalities need to do it again and also create a plan for saving 1 percent of their tax levies each year for the following three years. That can be through sharing services, mergers, cooperative agreements, or efficiencies, and the plans can be submitted individually or collectively.

Municipalities have until the end of February to participate in the new plan, which is supposed to be submitted to Conners’s office in May and to the state in June.

A county executive who supervises contracts, departments, and union negotiations would have to agree to the measures outlined in the government efficiency plan, but it  needs to be certified by a county comptroller or similar position before being it is reviewed by the state.

Mary Rozak, spokeswoman for the county executive’s office, declined to comment on the study, but pointed to efficiency measures and discussions that are ongoing.

“We here certainly applaud everyone’s efforts to find ways to save money and consolidate, but the county executive is already doing that,” said Rozak.

County Executive Daniel McCoy holds quarterly meetings with Albany County’s mayors and supervisors to discuss possibilites for streamlining, Rozak said, including how their efforts — cooperative purchasing agreements, shared engineering services, streamlined snowplow routes, reorganized departments, and consolidated 9-1-1 systems among them — could be recognized to qualify for the tax-freeze law.

“Very tricky”

The Albany County Legislature in September authorized $150,000 to pay for the study by the Center for Research, Regional Education and Outreach (CRREO) at State University of New York College at New Paltz, using money saved from an advanced refunding of the county’s debt.

Paying for the study, especially for the rural Hilltowns where their resources are limited, is just one way of making it palatable, Conners said. An advisory panel will include representation from unions, towns, villages, cities, and Conners himself, “with the idea that this won’t be dominated by the county,” the comptroller said.

Non-county officials among the 11 committee members make up a majority. Bethlehem Supervisor John Clarkson, Altamont Mayor James Gaughan, Local 801 Vice President Victoria Miller, City of Albany Treasurer Darius Shahinfar, and Cohoes Councilman Ralph Signoracci were tapped.

Representing the county, Sheriff Craig Apple, Legislator William Clay, Executive Director of Operations John Evers, county Clerk Bruce Hidley, and Conners will serve.

Gaughan said he wants to see whether the study can account for volunteers.

“Because it’s a vehicle for becoming more efficient, saving money and getting even more services to a municpality,” said Gaughan.

 “I’m looking for them to derive some metric out of it,” he said, hoping the work for Albany County would show state overseers how savings can be realized and reported.

The committee is supposed to guide the plan by setting priorities and finding ways to gain support from municipal leaders, who have to agree to carry out the plan, and workers.

“It’s very tricky, because, whenever you start crossing turf or political controls, people are very leery from people from the outside,” said Conners, whose office first developed the idea for a study in 2012.

Building trust

When, in 2006, county and town leaders proposed the county’s department of public works merge with the town of Berne’s highway department, the town board, after public outcry, voted down a grant that would have funded the merger.

“The upshot to that is you’ve got to start from scratch to build trust with people to do some things,” said Conners.

As an example, Conners spoke of accounting software used by his office that the rural towns of Berne and Rensselaerville were able to purchase on the county’s contract. Berne Supervisor Kevin Crosier credits the software with helping to achieve a leaner budget this year while town board members at Rensselaerville’s Nov. 13 meeting wondered how soon the town could be rid of its contract.

“It’s costing us a lot of money,” said Councilman Gerald Wood of Municipal Information Systems (MUNIS) software, which wasn’t functioning that week, as late adjustments to the town’s preliminary budget were being made to stay under the state-set levy limit.

A 2008 study by the Rockefeller Center in the University at Albany examined shared services in Albany County and found that wealthy municipalities were more likely to enter shared-services agreements. The study also observed that mayors and supervisors more inclined to share were more successful with their agreements.

The study was led by Sidney Creswell, who will also be on the advisory committee for the CRREO study.

Completed this year, a soon-to-be-released study of highway services by the LaBerge Group was funded by a grant approved in 2012 by all 19 municipalities.

It includes the recommendation of a series of pilot programs to trade specific plow routes with Bethlehem, contract for snow and ice removal with Colonie, and consolidate facilities with Knox, according to Rozak.

The county also looked across government layers in studies, in 2011 and 2012, of its health care benefits, its 9-1-1 emergency call system, and the Regional Solid Waste Authority.

As with past studies, the goal for the latest one will be to keep the same services while spending less on staff, though Conners said the county’s unions are more receptive to the idea than its political leaders.

“There’s one theory that: what would you rather have, battlefield amputation or would you rather participate in elective surgery?” he said.

The data

The work by CRREO will create two large databases — one with the location and characteristics of municipal workers throughout the county and the other mapping government services. With the areas of overlap and gaps displayed, models from these data developed with the advisory panel are aimed at reducing staff while keeping the same services.

“Retire [and] return to work part-time is certainly an area worth exploring if people are interested in doing that,” said Conners, giving an example of the type of incentives that would be used to cooperate with labor unions.

“For every two people you do that with you eliminate one FTE position,” he said of a full-time equivalent. Instead of laying people off, he said, they might also be put to work somewhere else.

The databases will categorize information like a virtual census of government workers, labeling them by age, seniority, employer, compensation, type of pension, health-care benefits, union, and location of work.