ERIE COUNTY, NY – The campaign of County Executive Candidate Mark Poloncarz today fired back at a recent statement from the Chris Collins campaign that used insulting and misleading language to question the Erie County Comptroller’s fiscal abilities.
“For Chris Collins to make an attack like this is both disingenuous and dishonest,” said campaign spokesperson Peter Anderson. “It’s well-known that Chris Collins gutted the office of the Comptroller, eliminating numerous positions in an effort to avoid transparency and accountability.”
When Chris Collins took office in January 2008, the Comptroller’s office had 48 budgeted employees. By 2011, that number had been reduced to just 27 budgeted positions. Included in those cuts were both Associate Deputy Comptrollers, one of which performed the financial advisory function Collins criticized the Comptroller’s office for not being able to perform on its own.
Anderson continued, “These cuts were politically motivated calculations to undermine the credibility of the Comptroller’s office, calculations that obviously didn’t add up for Chris Collins. Criticizing the Comptroller’s office after specifically targeting it for huge budget cuts is like shooting someone in the foot and criticizing them for limping.”
“Instead of making petty shots at Mark Poloncarz, Collins should explain why he refused to spend our federal stimulus dollars, why he went to court in 2009 to raise your taxes, or why he thinks our parks and beaches are in the ‘best shape ever.’ The truth is, Mark Poloncarz has done a great job as Erie County Comptroller and everybody knows it. Chris Collins can’t talk about his record nor find anything substantive to talk about so he is just grasping at straws.”
Since his election as Erie County Comptroller during the height of the “Red-Green” fiscal crisis, Mark Poloncarz dedicated his administration to restoring fiscal stability to Erie County’s government. He has released more financial statements and reports than any of his predecessors, including, for the first time, the issuing of comprehensive and detailed quarterly reports on Erie County’s finances. Additionally, Poloncarz has strengthened the Audit Division, making it into an Inspector General-style organization, which has conducted more than 50 major audits and reviews identifying more than $30 million in tax dollar savings.
In just the last week, Poloncarz has saved taxpayers more than $150,000 on the county’s short-term borrowing by injecting competition into the process and identified nearly $3 million in net savings over the next five years by hiring 67 additional deputies/corrections officers at our county jails. While over the past four years Collins has done absolutely nothing to address skyrocketing overtime costs within Jail Management and has indicated that he would rather continue to ignore the problem than implement any of Poloncarz’s recommendations.