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Chautauqua County’s government spending has steadily increased every single year since 2020, and the 6.5% spike for 2027 is a stark departure from the smaller, incremental increases of prior years.
The year-over-year spending reality includes:
-- 2020, $263 million -- baseline when Executive PJ Wendel took office.
-- 2025, continued multi-million dollar incremental growth.
-- 2026, $309.7 million.
-- 2027, $330 million -- an abrupt, massive $20.3 million single year spike.
Despite blaming external economic pressures like unfunded state mandates, the Legislature has not implemented any significant operational rollbacks or efficiency reductions to offset them. Instead of absorbing rising mandate costs by trimming local discretionary county overhead, the overall government infrastructure simply gets larger.
Instead of actually decreasing government spending, it has grown continually, and the $330 million 2027 budget relies on burning through local reserves to hide the true cost of an expanding government footprint.
Second, the county has quietly funneled $5.2 million from the county’s general fund to keep the North County Water District afloat. Instead of the water district being funded strictly by the property owners who actually benefit from the service, every single county taxpayer indirectly subsidized it because the money was drained right out of the county’s core savings. The county finance officials later attempted to spin the situation authorizing up to $5.4 million by floating an internal loan from the fund balance of the county general fund to cover for the blistering audit exposed by the New York state comptroller’s office.
Claiming the county would eventually make around $483,000 in interest on a repayment schedule comes at no relief when the North County Water district continues to run at an operational deficit.
Draining $5.2 million to patch up the water district’s unmonitored operational mess meant that millions of dollars and highly liquid general fund reserves were completely locked up and unavailable to cushion regular county operations.
The administration claims the $330 million budget’s $11 million drain and the fund balance is a necessary evil due to external “state mandates.” The reality is local mismanagement and a lack of financial analysis within county-created districts have heavily eroded the county’s fiscal safety net from the inside out.
The fund balance of the county budget is not a slush fund and years of over-taxation to build an excessively large balance is not fiscally responsible. If it was not for the county’s ever expanding government footprint they wouldn’t be in such a desperate position trying to mask a 6.5% spending hike.
James Lynden is a Fredonia resident and former village trustee.