The Aid and Incentives for Municipalities (AIM) program provides state aid to all of New York’s cities — other than New York City — and 137 towns and villages.
Not only has AIM aid been flat for years, critics argue that it’s no longer equitable.
This past legislative session, two western New York lawmakers, state Sen. Jeremy Cooney and Assemblyman Jon Rivera, sponsored a bill that would create a task force to re-examine the funding formula for municipalities.
The bill passed.
“I worked in county government and Sen. Cooney worked in city government so this has been a pretty interesting thing to press in Albany this year,” Rivera told Capital Tonight. “We both brought unique lenses to [the issue] that people in state government, at least in the Legislature, really weren’t looking at.”
The Cooney/Rivera bill, (S5418c/A6601a), establishes an AIM redesign task force comprised of stakeholders and lawmakers. The taskforce would analyze the formula and recommend changes.
If Gov. Andrew Cuomo signs the bill, one of the stakeholders on the taskforce would be the New York Conference of Mayors, which sent Capital Tonight this statement in support of the bill:
"The AIM program is intended to be New York's program of municipal property tax relief, but the chronic underfunding of AIM has placed a growing tax burden on city, village and town property taxpayers. The State's failure to increase its investment in AIM funding over the past 12 years has also been a barrier to addressing the inequities within the AIM "formula," which in reality is an amalgamation of outdated formula factors, erroneous assumptions regarding local service provision, and lump sum aid amounts not based on a rational formula. The creation of an AIM Redesign Task Force will provide a much-needed opportunity for a meaningful redesign and reinvestment in the AIM program, so as to (1) generate municipal property tax relief to all cities, villages and towns, and (2) address inequities in the AIM allocation formula without reducing aid to any single municipality."