ALBANY, N.Y. -- A plan designed to blunt a pension cost spike for governments is going to end up costing many of those localities more money. 

One aspect of the pension "fix" approved earlier this year by the Legislature and Gov. George Pataki is to move back the deadline for making the next pension fund payment from Dec. 15, 2004, to Feb. 1, 2005. For localities whose budgets are on a calendar-year basis, as most are, the change will allow them to move the payments onto their next fiscal year's books. 

But the new payment schedule will also be less advantageous for taxpayers. 

The pension payments are for the state fiscal years starting each April 1. Local governments routinely get a "discount," or a rebate, for the Dec. 15-April 1 period in recognition of the fact that the pension system holds their funds and makes money off them through investments. 

In recent years, the discount has been about 8 percent _ a rate equal to the longer-term rate of return earned by the pension fund. 

Now, by compressing the period between when the payment is due and when the fiscal year begins by 45 days, the pension system will save having to pay discounts for that period. 

For a county like Saratoga, which has a pension payment due of $6.2 million, the lost discounts will total $60,000, county Treasurer J. Christopher Callaghan said Wednesday. 

"This is a bit of silliness that they've come up with," he said of the payment deadline change. "The pension costs are real. We have pension costs in 2004, but not to acknowledge them is disingenuous, at best." 

Callaghan said that instead of getting the 8 percent discount from the pension fund for the Dec. 15-Feb. 1 period, he will keep the county's pension payment in a bank, where it will only earn 1 1/2 percent or 1 3/4 percent interest. 

"They can certainly make more than a percent and a half that we're getting," Callaghan said of the pension system. "The faster we get it into their hands ... the better off for everybody _ the municipalities, the pensioners and the pension system." 

Callaghan said during negotiations over the pension fund reforms, treasurers were told that the discounts for the Dec. 15-Feb. 1 period would be maintained for localities that could make the payment under the old schedule. But that option disappeared in the final legislation, he said, and state Comptroller Alan Hevesi's office confirmed that localities cannot make their next payments early. 

Edward Farrell, executive director of the state Conference of Mayors, said local officials are generally happy with the pension reforms. The changes also include more flexibility for local governments to borrow to meet the upcoming payment. 

"I have not heard anyone else complaining" about the partial loss of discount payments, Farrell said. "Most are thankful that they could go through the fiscal year without making a payment." 

The next pension payments by governments will average just over 11 percent of a locality's payroll costs, compared with 4.5 percent in the current state fiscal year. The increase is blamed on the hits pension fund investments on Wall Street have sustained since 2001. For some years in the late 1990s, little or no contributions were required of taxpayers. 

Hevesi's office will look into the complaints raised by Saratoga County, Hevesi spokesman Jeffrey Gordon said Wednesday. 

"The provision for changing the payment date provides almost a billion dollars of cash flow benefit to about 1,100 localities across the state and was sought by many public officials, including the New York Conference of Mayors," Gordon said. 

There are nearly 1 million current and former employees enrolled in the state's $119 billion local and state government retirement system. 

Local governments whose budgets do not run on a calendar-year basis cannot push their next payment onto the next fiscal year's books under the pension reform plan.