DAILY GAZETTE
Schenectady, NY
April 26, 2005

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Audit at HRBRRD should focus on fixing performance

The Hudson River-Black River Regulating District, which controls Great Sacandaga Lake, is lurching toward yet another public relations disaster. After a year's delay, it has finally hired an outside accounting firm and charged it with establishing the cost of running the lake's access permit system. Unfortunately, that audit is not what it seems.

Initially, this independent audit sounded like a good idea to the lake's 4,650 access permit holders. Since the access permit system is supposed to be self-supporting, they have to pay for it, and they want proof that they aren't being rooked by an organization with a long history of mismanagement and scandal. But during the one-year delay, the district pulled off a bait-and-switch trick. The audit was supposed to be a performance audit. Instead, the district instructed the audit firm to perform a conventional audit.

There's a huge difference. A conventional audit places a cost on how an organization conducts a specific task — no matter how inefficiently it does so. It's a snapshot that ignores cost savings that could result from better management, new technology and more efficient practices. By contrast, a performance audit places a cost on how a professionally managed, lean and-mean organization could conduct that same task. Obviously, a performance audit results in a cost figure considerably lower than that arrived at by a conventional audit.

I don’t know anybody who thinks the district is professionally managed. All of us agree that the conventional audit now under way will result in access permit fees far higher than justified. This switch in signals means that the lake's access permit holders will now view the district with even more distrust — if that's indeed possible. The irony is that with fewer than 30 employees, the district should be easy to streamline to assure that the stakeholders who pay for it are receiving full value. But that assumes a management team that knows its stuff.

The day can't come too soon when the regulating district, an independent state authority that reports directly to Gov. Pataki, is abolished and reincarnated as a full-fledged state agency subject to the oversight of the state Legislature.

PETER VAN AVERY
Edinburg

TIMES UNION
Albany, NY
April 12, 2005

River regulators weigh cost cuts as budget grows Hudson River-Black River district may close Albany office, trim jobs

By LEIGH HORNBECK, Staff writer

OLD FORGE -- As it considers a 7 percent budget increase, the Hudson River-Black River Regulating District is moving toward closing its Albany office to save money.

A Clifton Park architect estimates it will cost $400,000 to renovate the district's Sacandaga Lake office in Mayfield, Fulton County, to accommodate the staff that would be moved from the Albany office. Closing the office on Northern Boulevard would save $42,000 a year in rent.

Executive Director Richard Lefebvre also hinted that layoffs might be on the way as he looks for ways to cut costs.

"We have to be prepared to ask the hard questions about economies of staff," Lefebvre said. Seven people work in the Albany office, but only three are full-time. The office is 53 miles from the Great Sacandaga Lake in Mayfield.

The district controls water flowing into the Hudson River through the Conklingville dam in Saratoga County and the Indian Lake dam in Hamilton County. The Black River, which runs northwest from the Adirondacks into Lake Ontario, is slowed by the Stillwater Reservoir and dams at Old Forge and Sixth Lake, Herkimer County. The district maintains offices in Mayfield, Watertown, Old Forge and Albany.

Although the current budget was reduced from the previous year, Lefebvre presented a draft that would increase spending by $413,419. That would bring the budget from $5.9 million to about $6.3 million in the fiscal year beginning July 1. The district board will meet in Johnstown in May, when it will discuss the budget at length, and plans to adopt it in June.

Lefebvre hired Petersen Group Architects for $8,400 to review three ideas for reorganizing the 2,650-square-foot Mayfield office. The $1 million office, built in the early 1990s during a time when the district was heavily criticized for corruption, is known derisively as "the Taj Mahal."

"The Taj Mahal was built before us," said board member James Jankowski Monday. "If we were (on the board) then it wouldn't have been built. It was thrown in the face of those making small livings around the lake."

Jankowski said the regulating district can't sell the building because of where it is built, so the board should do as much as they can with it. He and the other members supported a plan by architect Thomas Petersen to install a second floor in the 5,000-square-foot maintenance building to create offices. The building is now used to park seven trucks. An added floor would create two floors, each 8 feet high.

The regulating district will meet at 9 a.m. at the Loyal Order of the Moose, Lodge 1185, at 109 S. Comrie Ave., Route 30A in Johnstown.