BILL NUMBER:S4255

TITLE OF BILL:  An act to amend the general municipal law, in relation
to authorizing cities, towns, villages, school districts, boards of
cooperative educational services, library districts, fire districts,
improvement districts and special districts to enter into cooperative
agreements for the provision of centralized public employee
administrative and personnel services

PURPOSE:  To enhance the ability of municipalities to join forces and
cooperatively provide and mange employee benefits in a manner that
reduces the cost of providing such benefits but which is also able to
give municipal employees more choices in the benefits provided.
Further, it clearly enables municipalities to, cooperatively
administer such employee benefits and other administrative personnel
overhead costs to help lower the overall cost of municipal government.

SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS:

Section 1: Amends General Municipal Law section 119-n to expand the
definition of municipal corporation to include public libraries for
the purpose of expanding the scope of Article 5-g of the General
Municipal Law which relates to municipal cooperative agreements or
activities.

Section 2: Amends subdivision 2 of section 199-o of the general
              

municipal law to add a new paragraph (b-1) to specifically authorize
municipalities to cooperatively establish a centralized administrative
human resources or personal office to share responsibilities, the work
and costs for the administration of certain employee personnel
services such as: employee payroll, time & attendance; participation
in the NYS Health Insurance program (NYSHIP); the establishment of
shared use and selection of various health care plans for its
municipal employees; employee participation in tax deferred retirement
plans, health care or medical savings plans, and child care savings
plans; and contracting with third party administrators to manage all
shared employee health care benefits or tax deferred programs.

Section 3 is the effective date.

JUSTIFICATION:  The cost of municipal government in New York continues
to escalate, hence local real property taxes are increasing to support
such governmental activities. Further, due to New York's declining tax
base in many sections of New York, this had lead to further increases
in municipal tax rates to compensate for the reduced assessed value of
real property. The Purpose of this bill is to give municipalities the
tools that they need to cooperatively provide services and administer
municipal employee benefits. Managing municipal employee benefits are
a major part of the cost of running local municipal governments
particularly smaller municipalities. This bill attempts to enhance the
ability of municipalities to cooperatively provide municipal employee
benefits such as health insurance, and tax deferred employee plans
such as retirement, health flex, medical savings plans and child care
savings plans through a centralized human resources office. Further,
it will allow municipalities to offer their employees the ability to
participate in more health insurance plans that better reflect the
needs of its employees. This increase in choice of plans can help to


reduce the cost of providing benefits because employees will be able
to better select the benefit plans that matches their family's needs
(which can be at a reduced cost). Further, by increasing a
municipality's ability to offer different health plans, this can
increase employee satisfaction and hopefully productivity.

This bill also can help to reduce the overhead costs that
municipalities experience to administer employee benefits by
specifically allowing municipalities to join forces to share the cost
of administering the servicers performed by a personnel or human
resources office or by the town or village clerk.

LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:  2011-12 -- S. 2843 - Passed Senate 2013-14 -- S.
1994 - Referred to Local Government

FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:  Anticipated savings for to local governments.

EFFECTIVE DATE:  This act shall take effect on the first of January
next succeeding the date on which it shall have become a law.