A few days ago, we looked at debt in New York counties (excluding New York City). We found that using several debt measures such as debt per county resident, Nassau County, which is in budgetary trouble, is an outlier.
But of course, there are many other things that we might look at and the most obvious is per capita spending. We excluded sales tax distributions to cities, towns and villages because those funds are used for non-county purposes and because there was an accounting change in 2007, which would have distorted the trend. What do we find?
Well, Nassau County is still an outlier, but not the only one on the high side. The most significant in recent years is Lewis County, which isn’t shocking because it’s relatively small. Hamilton, which is the smallest, has had high per capita expenditures also. Lewis is the 4th smallest.
Of particular note, other high cost counties are in the Hudson Valley region and include Westchester, Sullivan, and Rockland.
However, this time we also looked at the low end outliers. Saratoga, has a pattern of spending the least per county resident. But so does Putnam County, which is in the same region as Westchester, Sullivan, and Rockland. Putnam is relatively wealthy and that warrants review as a contributing factor.
Not surprisingly, the increase from 2008 to 2009 was a mere $3, and there was also a minor reduction in the variability between counties.
Note: Each dot on the graph represents a county. The line that runs through each year represents the mean for each year, weighted for population. Here’s the graphic.
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