Monroe County’s 2025 budget to establish centralized booking location, speed up arraignment process

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Monroe County Executive Adam Bello presented his 2025 budget proposal Friday, which totals $1.5 billion. That’s an increase of about 5% from the 2024 budget.

Despite the increase, the county plans to once again lower the tax rate. Bello says the plan reduces the tax rate by 9.3% — or 62 cents — to a rate of $6.03 per thousand dollars of assessed property value.

“The tax rate is able to go down because you have two things. First is new construction and new buildings, so you’re growing your tax base the other obviously when the assessments go up tax rates are able to go down,” Bello said.

Bello is calling the budget a responsible and responsive plan. Some of the highlights include investments in public safety, public health, childcare, and the historically low tax rate. Once in place, it will be the lowest property tax rate in Monroe County’s history.

Bello says since taking office five years ago, the county in the strongest financial position in more than two decades.

The bulk of the spending increase came from grant funding, payroll and benefits for county workers, and public assistance benefits and Medicaid.

The proposed budget included investments in public safety and established a new centralized booking location.

The county plans to establish a centralized arraignment court part — which would provide morning and evening arraignments. Bello says this won’t only make it so officers aren’t waiting around for the court to open, but also speed up the process making it more fair.

How it works

When someone is arrested they are taken to the police station to be booked and then wait for a judge to hold the arraignment. The proposal centralizes the process. If approved, it would all be done in downtown Rochester at the Monroe County Jail. There will be two sessions each day — one in the morning and one at night — when the courts are typically closed.

“So you’ve got all these police departments in all these town and village courts including the city courts that are all operating independent of each other — which is really unnecessary because we have centralized booking facility right — the Monroe – we have our sheriff deputies county jail,” Bello said.

“Police agencies when they make that arrest and they are waiting for that arraignment — you are now taking officers off the street, and to me, that doesn’t work. Why have all these various police agencies and tie up all those law enforcement officers when we have the infrastructure,” he added.

The public safety spending plan also includes $280,000 in increased funding for four new probation officers. Once hired, they will help with the county’s program, aimed at keeping young people previously involved in crime from re-offending.

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