You can’t go wrong with a pet story in LoHud-land and this one about people turning in more pets to animal shelters due to the poor economy – or just abandoning them – really got readers riled up. Most were saying that their pets are like children to them and they would go to the ends of the earth rather than give them up. They think some may be using the economy as an excuse to dump a dog or cat because they just don’t want to be responsible any more. Many entries included a variation on this comment: “Are you going to give back ur children during a recession too?”

Personally, our family includes two big goofy dogs that we love to pieces. Maggie is an 11-year-old Labrador and Otis is our 4-year-old Rhodesian ridgeback. I would be devastated if we ever got to such a point where we couldn’t take care of them anymore. But I also understand that this economy has really taken a toll on families and people and there are some who truly can’t care for their pets anymore.

Do you own pets? Do you find it harder to take care of them as the economy gets worse? To what lengths would you go to keep your pets?

Read the story and share your thoughts here.

Photo by Carucha Meuse/The Journal News

Photo of a female dog that was left at a Yonkers firehouse in July. The dog was turned over to the local animal shelter.

Today is the last day before Thanksgiving that Westchester legislators get to hear from officials in the Andy Spano administration justifying their 2009 budget requests. Starting at 9:30 a.m., the Budget & Appropriations Committee will hear from people in the Budget Department and Finance Department, among others, about why they’ve asked what for what they have from taxpayers for next year.

Of particular note: The county board gets to talk to itself. The budget for the Board of Legislators, drawn up largely by Chairman Bill Ryan, is usually discussed and defended by him, but we hear he’ll be sending someone else. We’ll report back on what takes place, and try to find if there are any hidden goodies in there (like last year’s would-be stipends for Ryan and others) or see if any lawmakers actually wake up to taxpayer exhaustion and anger, and trim their own budget.

A quick primer: According to their own documents, the board last year adopted a budget of $4,722,056 and then appropriated $4,759,342 for 2008—an extra $37,286. For 2009: The Board of Legislators’ budget would be $4,877,256, if adopted as proposed—that’s about $118,000 more than last year’s appropriation.

By the way, Legislator Mike Kaplowitz, vice chairman of the Budget & Appropriations Committee, submitted a proposal to Chairman Jose Alvarado last week in which he says $489,000 can, and should, be cut. Out of the savings, Kaplowitz wants to use $250,000 for a new office of Inspector General. Those are independent watchdogs for governments that can’t always watch themselves.

The outcome for all of this will be telling, to be sure. And I have a feeling taxpayers, who become voters to fill those very seats on the Wetchester Board of Legislators in next year’s fall election, will have longer memories than some officials currectly are giving them credit for.

Westchester County Legislators will be holding a public hearing at 10:30 a.m. Monday to discuss the proposed retroactive 2008 raises for county department heads, among others. The time of the meeting hasn’t gone unnoticed among readers, many of whom are saying they feel shut out of the discussion because they (fortunately) still have jobs to go to. They think that if the Legislators really wanted the public’s opinion, they would hold the meeting in the evening when more people would be home & could attend.

Here are a few choice words from our readers to county officials:

If you do it during the evening, these (legislators) would probably put in for overtime.

Mondays are notoriously lagging in public interest. Everyone is concentrating on the workweek ahead. It’s a good day to slide stuff through that otherwise might warrant a public outrage.

What do you think about the Monday morning hearing? Would you attend if you didn’t have to work or it was held in the evening? Share your comments here.

Interesting chats on today’s article about Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef’s proposal to give property tax scofflaws a longer period to pay off their debt (three years vs. the current two), and allow them to make a smaller downpayment (5 percent vs. the current 20 percent).

Most commenting on the story weren’t attacking the specific idea, but pointing out that people are struggling to pay ever-increasing property taxes. (A recent editorial, “Help to homeowners,” noted that Vanderhoef’s plan ”… won’t get at all of a troubled homeowner’s problems, but it will help. ”) And, you guessed it, forum posters pointed out that the county executive’s 2009 proposed budget includes a 9.85 percent property tax increase. In Rockland, the county’s share of a property tax bill is relatively small (about 6 percent) with the lion’s share going to school districts, as well as town/village costs. Yet forum posters found irony in pushing to give property taxpayers more time to pay a tax bill while raising their tax bill.

As one poster said: …”(raise) the taxes to the point people cant afford to pay them. Then give us more time to pay them back. Lets try this, lower the taxes and cut spending. This way the taxes will be lower and everyone can pay them.”

Or, as another said, “I can’t see the forest ! These darn trees are blocking my view!!!”

Just returned from a regular monthly meeting of the Westchester Board of Legislators, but there was one thing pretty irregular. A handful of Republican lawmakers wanted to put off a vote to set a date and time for a public hearing on Democratic County Executive Andy Spano’s controversial retroactive pay raise effort for his commissioners, managers and non-unionized staff; under the plan the 3.25 percent raise for more than 200 county employees would be backdated to Jan. 1, 2008. Judging by the reaction to our Sunday story about the Spano raise plan, the public is just a tad miffed — ok, apoplectic — given the desperate economic times.

Apparently, Legislator George Oros, R-Cortlandt, got the message, too, saying he had “heard enough’’ from the public since yesterday; he asked the 16 other members of the board to vote on putting off the public hearing altogether. Legislator Jim Maisano, R-New Rochelle, said that special times call for special leadership, and the current economic disaster should convince the lawmakers to not set a public hearing date, in effect killing the Spano legislation for now. The attempt failed—by a 14 to 3 vote — so the public hearing will be held Monday, Dec. 8, at 10:30 a.m. in the legislative chambers in the County Office Building on Martine Avenue in White Plains.

Oros made a good point, though—if the lawmakers were all that wedded to the hearing — and not “censoring’’ the public, as some lawmakers strongly characterized it — the Board of Legislators should have made it a night meeting so that the public, working or otherwise occupied that morning, could show up, really show up, and air their thoughts.

He was right.

A month ago, Journal News readers would have noticed that our Opinion page was largely filled with letters on the upcoming November elections. We welcome letters that offer a substantive discussion of the issues facing residents in our various municipalities and state and congressional districts. Unfortunately, in the case of the local races, most of what we received were letters written by candidates’ family members, friends, campaign staff and party activists. The typical letter would inform us that the writer had known Candidate X since high school, that the candidate was qualified to hold office due to having been a former PTA president, Little League coach, volunteer fundraiser, etc., and that he or she was “truly, truly concerned about the residents of our fair town.” This recitation of a candidate’s resume is fine up to a point, but seven or eight or a dozen letters of this type will make readers’ eyes glaze over, which is why most such letters were relegated to our Web site.

Letters regarding the Ossining town and village elections in particular generated more than one complaint about their having come from people who were a little too close to either the candidate or the party. While people who happen to have some sort of association with a candidate are entitled to make their opinions known (and certainly that association can lend some credibility to their assertions), we do draw the line at letters from campaign managers and paid staffers, or from party leaders, whose job it is, after all, to see their candidate elected. One example: Tom Reddy, who wrote a letter praising candidate Mike Aurora for village trustee, was revealed in an unrelated story last week to have been Aurora’s campaign manager and treasurer. Had we known, Reddy’s letter would have been disqualified. Other cases aren’t as cut-and-dried in deciding whether to publish, but are instances where we would have appreciated the writers being more forthcoming about their ties to the candidate. In Rockland, for example, there were instances of candidates’ spouses writing letters without identifying themselves as such.

Now, how do we enforce these rules? So far, we’ve refrained from demanding of every writer that he or she disclose any and all ties to the candidate being written about (or the opposing candidate, if the letter is critical), but clearly, the honor system isn’t working. For the next election cycle, we will publish reminders about our rules regarding election letters, and take more care in scrutinizing the letters we receive and asking questions of the writers if we smell something fishy.

Andy Spano, the Westchester County executive, is taking it on the chin for his plan to give pay raises for top department heads and commissioners. The weekend article on the matter and Phil Reisman’s column are both generating heat from taxpayers and others who have had it up to here with county government. In my view, some of the outrage is deserved and Spano’s own fault; some of it isn’t fully justified.

First of all, there are salable arguments for granting the 3.25 percent raises. Earlier this month, after going years without a contract, the county’s largest public-employees union, CSEA 9200, agreed to an accord that provides raises of 3 percent for 2006; 3 percent for 2007; 3 percent for 2008; 3.25 percent for 2009; 4 percent for 2010 and 4 percent for 2011. As an Editorial Board, we didn’t oppose those increases for 4,000 workers, despite a steady stream of editorials many in the public sector might consider “anti-feed at the public trough.” Why not oppose those increases? On the whole, the raises are within the realm of reasonableness when compared with the private sector, which saw average wage increases of 3.2 percent in 2006 and 3.3 percent in 2007. Additionally, the contract includes some givebacks on health care that will mean real savings to taxpayers over time, arguably justifying those 4 percent raises in the out years.

Against that backdrop, I’m not going to get bent out of shape about the boosts to the handful of top Spano staffers. They aren’t worthy of your sympathy or mine, but the officials haven’t had a raise since 2007, and without the increases (probably actually, even with them), they would lose ground to union staffers. It seems reasonable to expect for them to keep up. The CSEA contract should be the benchmark. Likewise, I’m not bent out of shape about the process; the Spano pay package was addressed in a public meeting a week ago, after the tentative CSEA deal was done reached. This isn’t analogous to 2007, when Board of Legislators Chairman Bill Ryan unveiled a huge increase in board stipends in December, after the budget hearings had basically concluded. This time, the public might be getting a late jump on the discussions, but that isn’t necessarily Spano’s fault. It took nearly a week for his plan to make the press. You should have been told sooner.

All that said, Spano is getting a beating, and part of it is his own fault. When he and his top staffer appeared before the Editorial Board last week in a meeting streamed live on our Web site, Spano made a big deal about not raising top salaries in the new budget. The assertion was technically correct (since the new raises would commence with the current budget), but not as forthcoming as the taxpayer should be able to expect — especially in the time of such taxpayer angst over public budgets, public-employee wages, budget cuts, etc. He should have made plain to The Editorial Board and taxpayers what he had in store for top staffers.

So Spano will trade a beating — in the figurative sense — for some raises. Matters could have been handled differently and certainly better.

The economy is front and center for residents of the Lower Hudson Valley. So it’s no surprise that news about the recently released Westchester County 2009 budget, which calls for an almost 3 percent tax increase, has been a talker on LoHud.com. Most posters have panned the budget for that increase, citing increasing pressure on taxpayers’ wallets in this dismal economy.

Already coming in for a huge amount of criticism for his budget, County Exec Andrew Spano didn’t win many more friends after it was revealed in the paper this weekend that many of his top dept. heads will be getting raises retroactive to the beginning of 2008. (The county’s Board of Legislators are scheduled to vote on the raises at 2 p.m. today.)

Here’s a sampling of what some people had to say on our Web site about the raises:

Everyone should make a note of how their legislator votes on this one. Then put the note in your calendar for Nov. 3, 2009, when they ask for your vote again.

How many people in the private sector have received a raise? Maybe a pink slip. This is just wrong. When is the last time people on Social Security received an increase that they didn’t take back in the form of Medicare increase? When does it stop? This is part of why we are in the mess that we are in. No raises for anyone.

Talk about being out of touch with reality. People are losing their jobs and homes and these people think they deserve a RAISE!!!! I say we vote for real change next time these bozos run and vote them out of office.

To read the whole story and leave your own comments, click here.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority is taking it on the chin from readers and commuters following word Thursday that it needs to boost revenues 23 percent by June, layoff up to 2,900 workers and cut service, thanks to a $1.44 billion budget gap. This is what one reader said in the LoHud.com forums:

How about the MTA re-negotiate their shotty (sic) labor deals. How much longer do I have to contribute to these bloated pensions for MTA offficers who retire after 20 yrs? How much longer can we accept these ridiculously high salaries for conductors to collect tickets? With a little utilization of technology, we can make them obsolete.

Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano wasn’t happy either. He said in a statement:

It seems ironic that at a time when we are trying to encourage people to use mass transit that we continue to ask the riders to bear more cost and inconvenience. Rather than find new ways to create incentives to choose mass transit, service cuts and fare increases only punish the very users who responsibly look to it as an alternative to the automobile.

But you have to wonder if the MTA’s would be in such rotten financial shape if the state Legislature had the foresight in April to OK the proposed congestion-pricing scheme for Manhattan. The $8 charge on motorists driving below 60th Street would have generated a half-billion dollars a year for mass-transit projects used by area commuters, plus another $360 million in transit help from Washington. That money went down the drain when the Legislature — with plenty of help from Westchester officials — sat on its hands.

Albany’s nonaction was revealed as short-sighted even before Thursday’s dire predictions from the MTA. We addressed this in an editorial Saturday.  When gasoline prices zipped past $4 a gallon over the summer, plenty of motorists got out of their cars and got onto the train — behavior that congestion-pricing proponents hoped to achieve with the $8 charge.

Now, we’ve managed to achieve the same — fewer drivers, more riders, more people crowding onto fewer trains — but without the bolstered resources for mass transit.

I hope that the Legislature revisits the matter again and that our local elected officials gain have a more enlightened and elastic view of “what’s in it” for us.