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ALBANY — In outlining its priorities for the coming legislative session, the New York State Association of Counties is calling for the state to pick up the tab for any increase in the hourly rates paid to lawyers for indigent individuals.

The lobby group for counties is also calling for the transportation of children with special needs who attend early intervention and preschool programs to become the responsibility of school districts and regional Board of Cooperative Educational Services systems.

“Counties are willing to partner with the state and school districts or regional BOCES to help pay for the transportation of these students to avoid a negative financial impact on school districts,” NYSAC said in its list of recommendations heading into the state budget season.

Without the state shielding counties from the full cost of paying for legal services for indigent individuals and children, the counties could be on the hook for millions of dollars in added expenses as a result of litigation seeking to raise the hourly rate for so-called 18-b lawyers to $158 per hour.

The New York State Bar Association pointed out in a recently filed lawsuit against the state that the rate for those lawyers has remained at $60 per hour for misdemeanors and $75 for felonies since 2004.

Assigned counsel rates in the federal courts have already been set at $158 per hour. The Bar Association argues the rate in the state courts should match the federal court rates in the 57 counties outside New York City.

“If those rates do in fact increase upstate, we’re going to work hard to make our position known that we believe it is a state obligation,” said Michael Zurlo, the president of NYSAC and the Clinton County administrator.

NYSAC says it is also looking to protect county taxpayers by pushing for reforms in the transportation of young children with special needs to school programs.

“There are regulations and laws that prevent common sense solutions to that,” Zurlo said. “I will tell you that in Clinton County alone, the gross expense exceeds $600,000 (annually). So you can imagine what that is for the larger counties. Something needs to be done.”

In its position paper, NYSAC states: “School districts and regional BOCES should be required to transport these children as they already have the infrastructure in place and are transporting their peers to local school programs.”

But David Little, executive director of the Rural Schools Association of New York State, argued that what the counties are shooting for would end up resulting in “an administrative shift” that won’t reduce overall expenses for the transportation of special needs children up to age 5.

“The schools don’t have a transportation system set up to handle toddlers and infants in any shape or form,” Little said. “From our perspective, it makes no sense whatsoever to do this kind of administrative shift. When you take money from people’s pockets and then take it from a different pocket, it’s the same money. The fact that the counties want out of the business is simply because they want their taxes to be restrained and put it on to the school tax, which is already the highest tax people pay.”

NYSAC is also supporting a proposal that would expand the bottle redemption law by including additional glass containers, such as those used for liquor, wine and ice tea. Meanwhile, the association is calling for the rejection of a proposal that would add additional plastic and aluminum containers to the bottle deposit law, noting such a move would remove more than $10 million in value from curbside bins used to offset the cost of local recycling.

On another front, NYSAC has emerged as an ally of the New York Farm Bureau in opposing the Hochul administration’s plan to gradually reduce the current threshold for farm worker overtime from 60 hours to 40 hours of work per week.

NYSAC wants to eliminate the three-member Farm Laborers Wage Board that crafted the plan for dropping the current threshold to 40 hours.

In a push for greater transparency in government, NYSAC is urging the state to provide funding that will allow county governments to hire officials who will process requests for documents made under the Freedom of Information Law and thus assist with FOIL compliance.

The counties are also asking the state to fully fund the foster care rate increases approved in the state budget enacted last April. Initial estimates suggest the added costs for the 57 counties outside New York City will run about $87 million, according to NYSAC.

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