Are Town and Tivoli paying their fair share for police?
Recommendation
At the Activity-Based Cost fully-loaded total of $1.11M (Village A General Fund, FY 26-27 adopted budget), contracts from Town, Tivoli, and the school district cover $401K. The Village itself carries the rest: $712K — 64.0%of the fully-loaded cost. Tivoli’s patrol contract pays $23K/yr; the Town pays $152K/yr across four line items. By assessed value, the Town outside the villages occupies 73.5%of the taxable base in the patrolled area — if it paid its AV share of the fully-loaded cost it would owe $818K/yr, a gap of $666K.
The contracts need a re-opener tied to fully-loaded cost, not to a negotiated dollar number that hasn’t tracked the department’s growth. Either: (a) re-price the Town and Tivoli contracts to their AV share of the audited fully-loaded cost, with annual indexing; or (b) consolidate into a town-wide police district funded directly by property tax, which would collapse the question entirely.
The Activity-Based Cost (ABC) pipeline reads the Village A General Fund AFR and reassembles the police cost by adding the share of Village-wide overhead and benefits that police consumes. The share is set by payroll: police personnel earned $683K of the $1.13Min total Village General Fund payroll — 60.7%of the Village’s wage base — so 60.7% of the benefits pool and 60.7% of the overhead pool are attributed to police.
| Component | Amount | Derivation |
|---|---|---|
| Direct police lines | $769,200 | A31201 + A31202 + A31204 from the AFR — personnel, equipment, contractual |
| Benefits allocated | $252,579 | 60.7% of $593,217 pool (retirement, FICA, workers comp, hospital/medical, etc.) |
| Overhead allocated | $88,775 | 60.7% of $184,000 pool (buildings, central garage, IT, insurance, dues) |
| = Gross fully-loaded cost | $1,113,054 | Total Village cost of providing police service |
| Less: contract revenue | −$400,856 | Town, Tivoli, school district, and other police- dedicated revenue (DCJS, infrastructure security, fees) booked under A1520 / A2260 / A2261. |
| = Village pays | $712,198 | What the Village funds itself for police — 64.0% of fully-loaded cost. |
How we computed this
The ABC pipeline is analysis/build_activity_based_cost_allocation.py; routing rules (which OSC account codes count as direct police vs benefits-pool vs overhead-pool) are in analysis/abc_routing.yaml. The full bundle is reproducible from the audited AFR via the DVC pipeline; the methodology is documented at the ABC methodology page and the per-FY drill-in is at Village A · FY 26-27.
The payroll-share method is conservative: it doesn’t assume police bear an outsize share of building space, IT, or insurance (which a hand-built earlier version of this analysis did). It just splits the shared pools by who’s on the payroll. That makes the result harder to dispute — the fully-loaded cost is grounded in audited line items, not in policy judgments about overhead weighting.
Fully-loaded police cost from 12/13 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 ($557K → $1.30M 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 $712K; 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:
| Payer | Instrument | Annual |
|---|---|---|
| Town of Red Hook | Intermunicipal Agreement § 4A (base patrol) + Town budget B0.04.3120.404/.405/.406 (sheriff coverage, mileage, court officers) | $151,745.7 |
| Village of Tivoli | Patrol contract (A2260T) | $23,000 |
| Red Hook Central School District | SRO contract (A2261) | $202,510 |
| Other dedicated | DCJS DWI, infrastructure security, police fees, fines — police-dedicated income that isn’t a jurisdiction contract | $23,600 |
| = All contract + dedicated revenue | Third-party offsets to fully-loaded cost | $400,856 |
| Village pays | Fully-loaded cost less contract revenue — what the Village funds itself | $712,198 |
The FY 26-27 adopted budget fully-loaded cost ($1.11M) is paid for by a mix of third-party contracts above ($401K) and the Village’s own funding ($712K). Contracts are negotiated dollar figures; they are not benchmarked to fully-loaded cost.
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.
| Jurisdiction | Population (2020) | What they pay/yr | Per resident |
|---|---|---|---|
| Village of Red Hook | 1,975 | $712,198 | $361 |
| Village of Tivoli | 1,012 | $23,000 | $23 |
| Town outside villages | 6,966 | $151,745.7 | $22 |
A Village resident pays roughly 17× 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.
A consolidated police district — or any town-wide property-tax arrangement — would split the fully-loaded cost by taxable assessed value. The 2025 Tentative Assessment Roll puts total Town-wide taxable AV at $1982.03M, of which 16.6% sits inside the Village of Red Hook, 9.9% inside Tivoli, and 73.5% in the Town outside the villages.
| Jurisdiction | AV share | Fair share of $1.11M | Actually pays | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Village of Red Hook | 16.6% | $184,767 | $712,198 | −$527,431 |
| Village of Tivoli | 9.9% | $110,192 | $23,000 | +$87,192 |
| Town outside villages | 73.5% | $818,095 | $151,746 | +$666,349 |
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 $527K/yr; the Town outside the villages underpays by roughly $666K/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.
What this would mean for Village taxpayers
The Village would no longer carry the $527KAV-share overage. Against the Village’s FY 26-27 total property-tax levy of $1.47M, that’s a 36.0% reduction in what the Village collects from property taxes — the biggest single move available to the Village without a policy change of its own.
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 ($712K = $1.11M − $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 $666K/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.
Related views:
- Activity-Based Cost methodology — Village — how the ABC pipeline works for the Village, including the police bespoke override; full per-service buildup table
- Village A General Fund — FY 26-27 drilldown — per-FY view of the line items the ABC pipeline reads
- Village A General Fund — multi-year overview — police as a percent of total appropriations, year over year
- Town General Fund — multi-year overview — the other side of the table: where the Town’s B31204 payment to the Village shows up
Sources
- recordVillage A General Fund — FY 26-27 adopted budget (ABC drill-in)— Direct + benefits + overhead allocation that produces the fully-loaded police number
- recordActivity-Based Cost methodology — Village— Plain-English walkthrough of the ABC pipeline including the police bespoke override
- recordVillage A General Fund — FY 26-27 drilldown— Per-FY view of the General Fund where police shows up at the OSC-category level
- recordVillage A General Fund — multi-year overview— Village General Fund dashboard, all years
- recordTown General Fund (A + B) — multi-year overview— Where the Town's payment to the Village for police shows up (B31204)
- docVillage-Town Police Services Intermunicipal Agreement (2026)— Section 4A base patrol payment; companion line items in Town 2026 Adopted Budget
- docVillage of Red Hook FY 2026-27 General Fund Budget (Draft, rev. 3-30-26)— Source for forward-looking contract revenue lines (A2260, A2261, A2260T)
- external2025 Tentative Assessment Roll— Town-total taxable AV used for the assessed-value-share counterfactual ($1.98B total); transcribed values in police_costs.yaml under assessed_values
- external2020 Decennial Census (NYS Open Data ri9p-efw2, k8m4-juax)— Village RH 1,975 · Tivoli 1,012 · Town total 9,953 · Town-outside-villages 6,966
- externalABC pipeline source: analysis/build_activity_based_cost_allocation.py— Reproducible allocation: direct + payroll-share benefits + payroll-share overhead, less dedicated revenue