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Publication Date: November 9th, 2025
Image Remixed from The Economist
You do not need a PhD in economics to see the problem. If a city’s population is steadily declining, as Hudson’s is, while its budget steadily climbs, as Hudson’s is, the remaining taxpayers carry more and more of the burden. In that light, it is no surprise that Kamal Johnson lost the recent mayoral election. Much of his natural base has already been forced over the border into Greenport, with its lower property taxes. Why pay Hudson taxes if you can use its Youth Center and get all the benefits without the cost?
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The City of Hudson is about to do something that no responsible household, business, or serious government should do. Today (November 10th), the mayor is scheduled to present the 2026 budget of about $19.6 million to the Common Council. The initial shortfall was not $400,000 but roughly $3 million, a revealing figure that shows department heads arrived with inflated requests, apparently unaware of the city’s precarious finances. That is not a strategy. It is a symptom of weak leadership, in which uncoordinated departments battle for slices of a fixed pie instead of working together to grow the pie through efficiency and sensible priorities.
A municipality is not supposed to be a job creation scheme for the friends (or significant others) or family of Mayor Kamal Johnson or former Mayor Rick Scalera. It is supposed to deliver public infrastructure and public safety at the lowest possible cost. In a world where national unemployment hovers around 4% (beating almost all OECD countries) and where people can look for work in Manhattan to the south, Albany to the north, online in an expanding digital economy, or in any of the many open jobs on Warren Street, the City of Hudson should not be the employer of last resort. If someone cannot find any work between Wall Street, the state capital, the internet, and the vacancies on the city’s main commercial and historic strip, the answer is probably not another line on the municipal payroll.
Thomas Sowell
Trade-offs are the essence of budgeting.
Do we want six unionized employees working year-round under local insider and newly appointed Calvin Lewis Jr at the Youth Center to serve perhaps 30 young people over the school year for two hours a day and around 60 youth over the summer, an appalling ratio for a nearly $800,000 program, or do we want to help a couple of dozen retired grandmothers and single parents across all wards, and especially the 2nd and 3rd, stay in their homes when property taxes rise?
What is more just? A cemetery with immaculate, frequently cut grass, or more funding for the area library that also serves as a community hub? Only the most basic health benefits for public employees who risk their lives to keep us safe, or serious enforcement of the ~$2 million in delinquent property taxes so that compliant homeowners are not squeezed further. We have to choose. We cannot have it all.
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BUDGETS SHOW PRIORITIES AND FACTS, NOT MORALS
A budget is not a sacred “moral document”, a slogan coined by progressive clergy in Washington and popularised during the Obama-era budget fights. It is a ledger of priorities and trade-offs, expressed in numbers. What a city chooses to fund, cut, or leave uncollected reveals whose interests are protected and whose are ignored, not how lofty its rhetoric sounds. Treating a budget as “moral” confuses intentions with results, invites every subsidy to dress itself in virtue, and turns any attempt at restraint into an accusation of cruelty. The language of compassion is cheap. The line items in a budget, and whether they deliver jobs, safety, and opportunity without burying future taxpayers in debt, are where fairness and common sense are actually tested.
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To close the remaining roughly $400,000 gap, the city plans to dip into the City’s “fund balance”, the municipal equivalent of a savings account. Hudson is, in effect, borrowing from its own future. That might sound familiar in Washington, which can run deficits and roll over debt almost indefinitely. A small city cannot. It does not control its own currency. It cannot sell trillions of dollars in Treasury bonds. It cannot levy tariffs or tax corporate or personal income. It cannot quietly inflate its way out of imprudence. In American history, municipalities that tried to live like miniature federal governments did not become enlightened welfare states. They became case studies in bankruptcy law.
If a municipal budget is above its real revenue, there is only one adult response: change the budget. That means cuts, new income, or both. What Hudson’s leaders must not do, yet again, is pretend that dipping into reserves is neutral and acceptable. It is not. It is a transfer from future residents and future taxpayers to today’s politicians and today’s favored programs. We cannot attend climate change protests in 7th Street Park one weekend and chant about future generations, and then, come Monday, saddle future generations with the bill.
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REFERENCE: WHAT IS A FUND BALANCE?
A municipal fund balance is the accumulated surplus from past years, the net difference between what the city has taken in and what it has spent. It is similar to home equity, which is the value of your house minus what you still owe on the mortgage. Both act as a cushion against shocks, whether that is a job loss at home or an economic downturn in the city. When a municipality steadily draws down its fund balance to pay for routine operations, it is the fiscal equivalent of repeatedly refinancing the house to pay the groceries.
Read more: New York State Office of the State Comptroller presentation “Understanding Fund Balance” (The Academy for New York State’s Local Officials, December 1, 2021)
https://www.osc.ny.gov/files/local-government/academy/pdf/understanding-fund-balance-12-01-2021.pdf
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Start with the expense side. If there were no waste, the plea for “just one more year” of drawing on savings might at least be sincere. In Hudson it is not.
This year alone, the city managed to waste about $225,000 on a comprehensive plan survey overseen by the Housing Justice Director. Because participation was too low to be statistically meaningful and responses were biased, the survey is effectively unusable for serious planning. That quarter of a million dollars did not buy better housing, safer streets, or one more working sewer line. It bought a PDF document that now sits on the shelf, the municipal equivalent of an expensive gym membership that no one uses.
Then there is the Oakdale Park matching grant, roughly $135,000 that was never properly budgeted and a hold-over commitment from many years ago. Matching grants are not “free money”. They are commitments. Accepting them without a corresponding line in the budget is not progressive, it is negligent.
Another expense line that can easily help balance the budget is overtime at the Department of Public Works and the Youth Center.
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Oakdale Park Matching Grant Story
Consider next the Youth Center. It costs nearly $800,000 a year to run. More than 40% of the young people who use it live not in Hudson, but in Greenport. If Greenport contributed even roughly in proportion to use, that would be about 40% of the operating cost, or around $320,000. At present, Hudson taxpayers are effectively subsidizing another municipality’s youth services. That is one of Sowell’s trade-offs in its purest form. Subsidize services for another town’s residents, or reduce the pressure on Hudson families trying to pay their own bills.
Read also:
Oakdale Park Grant: Gift or another example of Hudson’s financial dysfunction?
Mayor Kamal’s Perspective:
Kamal has stated that he believes that any HCSD student, in other words youth from Hudson, Greenport, and surrounding areas, ought to be served at the City of Hudson Youth Center. But this logic is flawed. Does that mean HPD should also police Greenport? Is that fair to Hudson taxpayers? Should Hudson DPW pave Greenport roads? Or perhaps he fears that the Youth Center corruption will be laid bare when, without Greenport youth present, it is revealed that the Youth Center’s unionized staff have a ratio of 1:3 to City of Hudson “youth”.
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The cemetery tells a similar story. Total cost is about $547,000 a year. It generates only around $100,000 in revenue. That leaves roughly $400,000 that must be covered from the general fund. The city is entitled to maintain its historic cemetery, but a permanent operating subsidy of this size, without serious scrutiny of efficiency and fees, is hard to justify when the budget is already unbalanced. Nice lawns and frequent mowing are not free. They arrive in the form of higher taxes or lower reserves. Surely there is a less expensive landscaping method, or a not-for-profit can step in to help. A wise mayor would convene a team comprised of City Hall employees, local undertakers, and historic preservationists.
Add these items together and the picture is stark. The useless $225,000 biased “Comprehensive Plan” box-ticking survey exercise. The unbudgeted $135,000 park matching grant decided in secret by Spark of Hudson leaders, lobbyists like Peter Frank, and residents with property adjoining the park. The $320,000 in Youth Center cost that should be shared with Greenport or the tax-rich and results-poor Hudson City School District. The roughly $400,000 of cemetery cost that is not covered by its own revenue. In round numbers that is more than $1 million. The current $400,000 gap could have been more than filled by simply not making bad decisions, aligning contributions with usage, and demanding that facilities cover more of their own cost.
If spending restraint is one side of the ledger, basic enforcement is the other. Hudson is not only overspending. It is also repeatedly refusing to collect money it is owed.
There are more than $250,000 in outstanding and late parking fees that the city has simply failed to pursue. Even more that may never be recovered due to statute of limitations issues. Parking fines are not an optional tip jar. They are part of the agreed rules for public space and traffic management. Not collecting them rewards non-compliance and penalizes the residents who do pay on time.
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On a larger scale, Hudson has roughly $2 million in delinquent property taxes from owners who have not paid in years. The law is clear. Those properties can be seized and sold. Holding them on the books while taking from the fund balance is an inversion of duty. The city at first chose to protect chronic non-payers, while shifting the burden onto compliant homeowners and future taxpayers. In recent months, largely after public scrutiny, constant demands for transparency, and the hard-fought election, the City of Hudson finally created a plan to collect back taxes, even if slowly and with a grace period. Our Editors wonder aloud if the City of Hudson would ever have pursued delinquent taxes if the mayor did not lose the Democratic Primary?
Not collecting taxes owed is a kind of double fiscal crime: first, Hudson never sees the money it is already owed; second, by leaving these parcels in limbo instead of foreclosing, reselling, and bringing them back onto the tax roll, the city keeps potentially productive properties off-line. Those empty or underused buildings could be renovated into homes for new or existing families, or turned into businesses that create jobs and pay reliable taxes. Failing to collect back taxes is not only unfair to current residents, it blocks the very private investment that could broaden the tax base and reduce pressure on everyone else.
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A: The newly created Housing “Justice” Director Office
B: The Parking Kiosks sitting idle?
C: The flawed Comprehensive Plan survey that cannot be used?
D: Other - please let us know on Instagram
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“A government of laws, and not of men,” John Adams wrote, is the only real security for a free people. Selectively refusing to collect delinquent taxes or parking fines while pursuing everyone else violates that standard. It turns law into a discretionary favor, rewarding defaulters and penalizing the diligent. Over time, this corrodes trust, teaches that rules are optional, and creates a two-tier system in which consequences are arbitrary rather than earned. That is not leniency. It is quiet sabotage of the social contract. And it is also why voters nationwide have soured on calls for “social justice”, and “equity.”
There is more. The Code Enforcement Officer (CEO) has not issued notices and fees for vacant properties. No one can say exactly how much revenue is being left on the table, which is itself an indictment. At a time when residents are told there is “no choice” but to dip into reserves, the city is not collecting money it is lawfully owed from vacant building fees. Our Editors have reached out to the ever professional Code Enforcement Officer (CEO) for comment and will update the story with any news.
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Update: Craig Haigh the Code Enforcement Officer was kind to write to our editors while he is out to confirm that there are 16 properties that are on the vacancy list, and that notices to property owners will go out “in the next month or 2.” he also added that the “vacant registration fee is $1000.00, which most of the owners will mostly not be able to pay. Which is another legal process that we will have to follow.”
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Before any talk of raising taxes or cutting essential services, a competent municipality would do three simple things: aggressively collect overdue parking fines, take action on long-delinquent property taxes, and bill vacant property owners properly. Hudson has done none of the above with conviction. If it did, we could collect more than $2 million and replenish the fund balance. Taken together with the easy $1 million in savings illustrated above, the City of Hudson should not have to raise taxes by 3.9%, the legal maximum.
There is a third way to close a deficit that has nothing to do with cutting services to residents or endlessly raiding savings. It is to make the people who mismanage the budget share the pain.
At present, each of the eleven Common Council members receives an honorarium of about $5,000 and benefits of roughly another $5,000 or more. That is at least $10,000 per member, or around $110,000 in total. The Common Council President, Tom DePietro, receives a higher honorarium ($10k) than other council members, and that additional stipend should be no more protected than anyone else’s pay when the budget does not balance. The mayor receives about $80,000 in salary and perhaps $20,000 in benefits, roughly $100,000. The mayoral aide adds another $50,000. The City Treasurer receives a salary in the region of $80,000. Taken together, the political and fiscal leadership costs at least $350,000 per year, and every dollar of that, including the Treasurer and mayor’s salary and the president’s premium pay, should be at risk until the books are balanced.
If the budget they oversee does not balance, these salaries and benefits should be paused. A city that can tell a pensioner on a fixed income to pay higher property taxes can certainly tell politicians and senior officials that part or all of their pay will be withheld until they deliver a balanced budget. It is simple accountability.
In future years, Hudson should adopt a clear rule: if the budget does not balance, the difference is taken first from the salaries and benefits of the elected officials and senior political staff who failed at their core task. That principle exists in the private sector, where executives who destroy shareholder value do not usually keep their bonuses. There is no moral reason it should not apply in local government.
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In Hudson, trying to build a modest four-plex is priced like a luxury tower once you stack zoning hurdles, sprinklers and elevators, soft costs, and some of the highest property taxes in New York State. The common sense fix is straightforward: cut the crushing property tax burden and legalise denser “missing middle” buildings as of right in already serviced areas.
🏗️ See Common Sense primer on “Gentle Density” and what is “Missing Middle Housing”:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DKPX7FfR6Cl/?img_index=1
Kamal has preferred a more baroque route. He created a new Housing Justice office and installed as its head someone with whom he had a personal relationship, a clear conflict of interest in a city already short of trust. He sponsored slanted surveys, staged process-heavy meetings, and generated glossy rhetoric, vilified developers, and passed Rent Control laws with Gary Purnhagen and Claire Cousins, while the number of actual new middle-income units remained close to zero. Everything, in other words, except the boring, effective work of letting people build more housing and letting residents keep more of their own money.
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There is a deeper structural problem. Hudson does not merely have an unbalanced budget. It has a budget that is too big.
Per resident, Hudson spends roughly two to three times what neighboring municipalities such as Kinderhook, Chatham, and Claverack spend. These towns are of similar overall population, yet residents generally enjoy at least comparable, and in some cases better, core services. If Hudson’s per capita spending matched these neighbors, the annual city budget would be closer to $10 million rather than $20 million. City Hall employees, DPW, and HPD should not fear this spending level. When the City is enabled to grow with more tax parcels, more real revenue, there is no reason why existing and critical public employees should experience any changes.
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This gap is not a triumph of social democracy. It is a tax on housing and work in one of the few small cities in the Hudson Valley that still aspires to be a mixed-income community. Every extra million dollars in municipal spending must ultimately be raised from property owners and passed on in rents. In a city about to undergo a long-delayed, city-wide reassessment of property values, this is not an abstraction. Higher assessed values multiplied by a bloated budget will push more middle-class and working families out of Hudson.
The recent election result underlines this (and read our full Election ‘25 coverage here). A relative newcomer to town, Joe Ferris, without even a campaign manager, who has lived in Hudson for less than four years, defeated Mayor Kamal Johnson, a thirty-year resident and incumbent backed by the full organizational machinery of local non-profits such as Spark of Hudson, Friends of Hudson Youth, Hudson Promise Neighborhood, Kite’s Nest, and the Hudson Catskill Housing Coalition (IRS tax disclosures still missing, QC and CC), and not to mention Scalera Inc. in the 5th Ward, donors like Colarusso and the Bard College CFO, and the Working Families Party. That upset is an indictment of the status quo and the clearest possible signal that voters do not want a continuation of Kamal’s “social justice” and “equity” budgetary approach. The people have already rendered their verdict on this model of government, they want basic municipal services and boring competence. Stop the drama.
The 2026 budget is also structurally unfair. The incoming mayor, Joe Ferris, and the incoming Common Council President, Margaret Morris, have been elected to change course. Yet if the current unbalanced budget is rammed through by the outgoing administration, their first year in office will be spent doing little more than defusing landmines. They will inherit a fiscal mess created by predecessors, and be forced to pare back budgets line by line just to restore balance, while being blamed for cuts they did not originate.
There is a philosophical issue as well as a financial one. A high municipal budget that funds a growing array of services beyond public safety and basic public infrastructure is not progressive. It is illiberal. It forces productive homeowners, many of them elderly or on fixed incomes, to pay for increasingly expansive local services that duplicate what their state and federal taxes already fund, from social programs to recreational amenities. If this were a rural red state with few social services that would be one thing, but New York State has the highest combined tax rate.
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/state/2025-state-tax-competitiveness-index/
New York State has the highest tax burden in the nation, and the City of Hudson, the highest in Hudson Valley.
Local government has a legitimate role in policing, roads, water, sewers, and a modest level of civic amenities. When it moves beyond that, it risks becoming a transfer machine that taxes those who create value in order to fund fashionable projects that win applause in meetings but deliver little measurable benefit in jobs, safety, or long-term growth. The unusable $225,000 survey is a perfect illustration. It satisfies an ideological urge but leaves no lasting capital.
Intergenerationally, this is corrosive. Drawing down the fund balance to avoid facing these choices is a form of stealth taxation on people who are not yet in the room. It is the municipal equivalent of running down the family inheritance to pay for an extra holiday and calling it “investment.”
2026 Recommended Citywide Budget.pdf
The City of Hudson’s Proposed City Budget for 2026
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