Westchester Warns of Budget Gap Due to Revenue Loss from COVID-19 Pandemic
Westchester County Executive George Latimer has announced that the county’s finances, like those of other governments, were in freefall as a result of the COVID-19 crisis and that the county would immediately institute a budget cut of $21 million to begin dealing with the situation. Latimer estimated the county’s lost revenues could be somewhere between $90 million and $160 million due to the pandemic. The county’s 2020 budget is $2.1 billion.
“We have lost already in a very short period of time a significant amount of revenue from the various sources that the county has in revenue,” Latimer said. “We are estimating at this moment in time that we will have somewhere between a $60 million loss and perhaps as great as a $125 million loss in revenue from sales taxes. That’s a huge amount. We also are going to be losing a significant amount of money from the hotel occupancy taxes. Hotels are practically empty at this stage of the game. That could be as much as a $10 million loss to the budget. That’s on the front-end side.”