Who pays for Red Hook Police?

The Activity-Based Cost (ABC) pipeline reads the Village A General Fund budget and reassembles the police cost by adding the share of Village-wide overhead and benefits that police consumes. Police personnel earned $683K of the $1.11Min total Village General Fund payroll — 61.6%of the Village’s wage base. Most benefit lines (ERS, Social Security, Medicare, Village workers comp) are allocated by payroll share. Medical insurance has a line item that is police-specific so 100% routes to police. PFRS (A9015) is police-only by statute (NYS RSSL Article 8) and routed direct rather than pooled. Overhead lines use bespoke shares calibrated to how heavily police uses each one: 35% of buildings (police staffed 24/7), 50% of unallocated insurance (primary liability exposure), 40% of IT (heaviest user).

Fully-loaded police cost from 94/95 through the FY 26-27 adopted budget, split by who pays. The bottom band is what the Village pays itself (residual); the colored bands above are contract revenue from Town, Tivoli, school district, and other dedicated sources. AFR years (audited) collapse Town/Tivoli/School contracts into one rolled-up OSC line; the two budget years on the right break them out by payer.

Total cost more than doubled over the AFR window ($231K → $1.35M in FY 24-25), with the steepest jump between FY 22-23 and FY 24-25. Contract revenue grew too, but not as fast: the gap widened, which shows up as Village-band growth — the Village is footing more of the bill in absolute dollars even as contracts contribute more in absolute dollars.

At fully-loaded cost, the Village pays $770K; contracts cover the remaining $401K. Contracts break out as A2260 / A2261 lines in the Village’s FY 26-27 adopted budget plus the signed Intermunicipal Agreements:

The FY 26-27 adopted budget fully-loaded cost ($1.17M) is paid for by a mix of third-party contracts above ($401K) and the Village’s own funding ($770K). Contracts are negotiated dollar figures; they are not benchmarked to fully-loaded cost.

Fiscal years starting 1994 through 2026. Each line is the spending that jurisdiction's own residents fund for police, net of what the others pay in:

• Village = direct department spending (every police- or sheriff-labelled appropriation in the Village AFR) minus contract receipts from Town, Tivoli, and the School District. This is what Village residents alone fund.
• Town and Tivoli= each jurisdiction's own police-labelled appropriation (contract payments to the Village + Sheriff). For them this iswhat they fund — they don't run their own departments.

See the methodology page for the contract-receipts data sources and the netting math. The three jurisdictions use different FY conventions in the source data (Village & Tivoli June–May, Town calendar year), so the chart x-axis is normalized on the start of the fiscal period. The background bands mark Village mayoral terms — useful context for spotting policy-driven discontinuities in the Village line.

A note on what each line measures: Village is fully-loaded direct department cost (salaries + benefits + contractual + equipment) minus contract receipts. The Town and Tivoli lines are mostly their payments to the Village(and to the Sheriff in the Town's case). For years where contract- receipts data is missing, the Village line falls back to gross — currently this only affects pre-1995 years (where AFR data doesn't exist either) and 2026 future-year projections where contracts are signed but Town/Tivoli AFRs aren't yet filed.

The clearest version of the fairness question is per resident. The Village runs the only police department; Town and Tivoli residents get patrol service too, but pay through their contract instead of through the Village levy.

A Village resident pays roughly 18× what a Town-outside-villages resident pays for the same police protection. The Village absorbs the largest unit cost — in part because they live where the station is, but mostly because the Village covers the residual after the (small, fixed) contract revenue is recognized.

Property tax in NY works as a rate: the levy a jurisdiction has to raise, divided by its total taxable assessed value, gives a tax rate — quoted per $1,000 of AV. That rate applied to your home’s AV is your annual tax line. For police that goes in two steps.

Step 1 — Police share of each jurisdiction’s tax rate

Village figure uses the net levy burden ($601,339) — the property-tax-funded portion of police only. The Village also funds part of police from state aid, sales tax, and other non-tax revenue, so the total Village burden ($769,984) is larger than what shows up on a property-tax bill. Town and Tivoli figures use their gross contract payments since their ABC breakdowns aren’t available here — this is the conservative direction (Village figure is the floor, Town/Tivoli are gross).

Step 2 — Apply that rate to a $430,000 home

The median owner-occupied home in the Town of Red Hook is assessed at $430,000 (ACS 2024 5-year, ±$24,820; Red Hook is a 100% RAR community so market value ≈ AV).

For two equivalent $430,000 homes, a Village owner pays roughly 18× what a Town-outside owner pays for the same patrol service. (Per resident the multiple is also around 18×, but the per-home figure is the more apples-to-apples comparison because property tax is levied on AV, not on people.) Village residents are exempt from the Town’s B-fund where the $150,000 police line sits, so this isn’t double-counting — the $730 is the full municipal police line on a Village home.

A consolidated police district — or any town-wide property-tax arrangement — would split the patrol cost by taxable assessed value. Patrol cost here means fully-loaded police cost ($1.17M) less revenue from outside the three resident-bases: school district SRO + activities ($202,510), public service fees, and outside grants (DCJS DWI, Infrastructure Security) = $968K. The Town and Tivoli contract payments are NOT netted out here — those are the resident-base contributions being tested against AV-share. The 2025 Tentative Assessment Roll puts total Town-wide taxable AV at $2142.15M, of which 16.5% sits inside the Village of Red Hook, 9.8% inside Tivoli, and 73.7% in the Town outside the villages.

Reading the gap column: a positive number means the jurisdiction is underpaying its AV share of the fully-loaded cost; a negative number means it’s overpaying. The Village of Red Hook overpays its AV share by roughly $610K/yr; the Town outside the villages underpays by roughly $563K/yr. Tivoli sits closer to its AV share (and even slightly overpays at the current $23K contract), but its AV share is small to begin with.

AV-share is one defensible basis; per-capita and per-call-volume are others, and each yields a different fair-share number. The “actually pays” line for the Village is gross fully-loaded cost minus contract revenue ($770K = $1.17M − $401K).

• Re-open the Intermunicipal Agreement. The existing § 4A base-patrol number is a negotiated dollar figure with no documented link to cost. Replace it with a formula: AV-share of fully-loaded cost from the prior year’s audited AFR, indexed annually. That ties the contract to a number the public can verify.
• Surface contract revenue in the AFR. Today the Town/Tivoli/school contracts collapse into broader A226x revenue lines in the audited filing, so the offset they provide isn’t visible to the public without the budget document. The Treasurer can post them as discrete supplemental schedules.
• Evaluate a town-wide police district. A single property-tax district covering the whole Town would make the AV-share-of-fully-loaded-cost arrangement the default. The current piecemeal contracts produce the outcome of an AV-share district minus roughly $563K/yr in Town-outside contributions.
• Publish a fully-loaded police cost annually. The ABC pipeline now produces this number from audited inputs. Putting it in the budget book each year — alongside the contract revenue — would let Board members and residents track the gap without redoing the arithmetic from scratch.

The fully-loaded police cost is built from line items in the Village’s adopted budget plus a small set of allocation assumptions. Where the assumption can be replaced with a better number, we say how.