Housing homeless is overwhelming Wash. Co.

By Cathy DeDe, Chronicle Managing Editor

Hebron Town Supervisor Brian Campbell reached out to The Chronicle to sound an alarm on the eve of Washington County budget talks.

Mr. Campbell, who is the Board of Supervisors’ Finance Chair, warns, “If we do nothing,” residents face a property tax increase of at least 10 percent or even 11 percent in 2026.

He says the primary driver is 2024 Department of Social Services unreimbursed costs and overages associated with mandated temporary housing for individuals and families.

Mr. Campbell said DSS emergency housing costs were up about $1.5 million in 2024, while reimbursements — federal funding administered and controlled by the state, he said — came in at about $2 million less than expected.

Mr. Campbell said he only learned this in March, when state reconciliations were completed for the 2024 budget.

As a result, he said the County unexpectedly had to tap about $3.5 million in fund balance reserves at the beginning of this year to close the two-part gap.

“I need to get the story out so the taxpayers know I’m outraged,” Mr. Campbell said.

“This never should have happened, and I shouldn’t have been the one to find it.

“They should have been telling us all along at the department. I find out in March what happened the year before, and I still can’t get an answer today that Social Services even knows what happened.”

Still, he says, “I’m not looking for blame, I’m looking for fixing this so it doesn’t happen again.”

Complicating matters, the long-time Commissioner of Social Services, Tammy DeLorme, retired last month.

New commissioner Duane Vaughn won’t take the reins until the end of September. He currently heads Shelters of Saratoga and previously led Tri-County United Way and WAIT House in Glens Falls.

Mr. Campbell says early numbers indicate that DSS costs in the first quarter of 2025 remain similar to last year.

He said that last year the County Board opted to fund expected additional costs to renovate the former Burgoyne School for the Public Health Department with $3 million from the fund balance, rather than bond it or raise taxes.

They can’t further deplete the fund balance for 2026, Mr. Campbell says.

They’ll put off pre-paying their retirement benefits bill, typically a cost-saving measure, he said, in order to make payroll in the early part of 2026.

With this and other budget stresses, Mr. Campbell says, “Washington County is in dire straits. Our taxpayers need to know why, how, and where we go to fix it.”

What happened at DSS?

“During Covid,” Mr. Campbell says, more people were made eligible for temporary housing through New York State mandates — “I believe it was 300 percent of the poverty level,” he says.

Even though the County’s cost for housing individuals and families was rising, “Covid money came galore,” he says, keeping up with those costs, so DSS was balancing its budget, no alarm raised.

That changed this year.

Mr. Campbell says there are complicated systems of caps and reimbursement rates that he says are not clear to him. He said he’s not seen that the County DSS has clarity either, which he attributes to the state’s holding the purse strings.

Mr. Campbell said, the county hired a consulting firm at a cost of $30,000 to look into the rising costs, changing reimbursements, and populations being served, to understand and potentially control the cost.

“I’m still figuring a lot of this out too,” Mr. Campbell says.

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Washington County’s next Finance Committee meeting is today, Thursday, Sept. 11, at about 9:45 a.m. at the Municipal Center in Fort Edward.

Emergency lodging: Washington County pays millions to motels in Warren & Saratoga Counties

Chronicle Managing Editor Cathy DeDe writes: Washington County found itself about $3.5 million in the red for costs of temporary emergency housing through its Department of Social Services in 2024.

“All this for about 620 individuals,” says County Finance Chair and Hebron Town Supervisor Brian Campbell, citing his estimate of adults and children who received County housing for 2024, the last full year reported.

“We need to assist people when they’re down to get them back going, but we can’t enable them to live off us for the rest of their lives, he says. “This is just off the rails.”

With only two motels and one shelter available in Washington County, in 2024 it paid nearly $2 million to house people in Warren County motels and shelters and more than $200,000 in Saratoga County.

That includes nearly $500,000 paid to the The Budget Inn in Queensbury last year, up from just over $200,000 to that same motel in 2023.

Mr. Campbell believes non-eviction rules during Covid hurt landlords; once lifted, they looked to rent their apartments to a different clientele.

As a result, most of the County’s housing costs have shifted to motels, which are more expensive than apartments, Mr. Campbell says — and less available in the county.

• In 2024, the County paid $2,746,436 for 34,046 total bed nights, according to a DSS spreadsheet Mr. Campbell shared. He says they are still seeking to understand fully how many individuals this includes, and length of stays.
• In 2023, the county paid $1,727,050 for 22,904 motel nights.
• In 2022, it paid $739,249 for 5,425 nights.
• The 10-year high was 12,043 room nights in 2016 — for $816,231.

“We were whittling the numbers down,” for several years from there, Mr. Campbell says, to just under 7,000 room nights in 2019, and (a Covid anomaly, he says) just 1,312 in 2021.

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