December 10, 2019
The New York State County-Wide Shared Services Initiative (CWSSI), enacted in 2017, encouraged local governments to uncover hundreds of millions of dollars in potential cost savings through cooperation and the mutual use of resources. As a first step, the initiative required the chief elected officer in each county to convene a panel of local leaders (the Shared Service Panel) to develop a plan that identified multiple opportunities for local governments to share services and save taxpayer dollars. These Shared Services and Taxpayer Savings Plans were to be approved by each county by the end of 2017 and acted upon in 2018. Some counties amended their 2017 plan in 2018 so that they could be acted on in 2019.
In 2019, Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State Legislature amended the law to extend the deadline for counties to identify, approve, and act on cost-saving initiatives, and to expand the reach of the initiative to allow fire districts, fire protection districts, school districts, Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), and special improvement districts to join the county’s CWSSI Panel. The modified CWSSI law reflected the evolution of the program into “multi-year planning [with annual amendments] … identifying all potential property tax saving actions and a timeline for their undertaking.”
Nassau County’s initial Shared Services and Taxpayer Savings Plan, submitted in 2017 under the original mandate of the CWSSI, proposed 43 projects with the potential to produce cost savings of more than $130.7 million. The county successfully completed a shared roadway management system with the town of Hempstead, the villages of Brookville, Old Brookville, and Mill Neck began to purchase needed road maintenance materials and fuel from the town of Oyster Bay; and the Nassau County police department also began purchasing gasoline from Oyster Bay. Certified savings realized from these shared services projects resulted in more than $200,000 in state matching funds. The vast majority of identified potential savings — $128 million — was to have been realized from the consolidation of wastewater treatment services between the city of Long Beach and Nassau County, a project that did not proceed, reportedly because of lack of a funding source. Of the remaining projects, three are reported as cancelled; the rest are still in progress (see Appendix B).
