County Executive Chris Collins will reveal in his State of the County address today that Erie County ended 2009 with a $44 million surplus, one of the largest in years.

The county derived most of it, around $41 million, from the stimulus money the federal government gave to counties that pays a portion of their Medicaid programs.

The federal stimulus dollars have protected services and public-sector jobs for Erie and a number of counties around the state and nation. The aid is expected to continue into 2011.

But Collins on Wednesday said that even without its stimulus money, Erie County would have landed in positive territory last year, with a small surplus of around $3 million.

“During the worst recession since the Great Depression,” he said, “Erie County absorbed an $11 million loss in sales tax receipts, year over year, and incurred a $2 million expense related to Flight 3407 and the floods in Gowanda.

“So there’s a $13 million hit, if you will, compared to the prior year. Without using any stimulus money,” he added, “we still had a $3 million operating surplus.”

With a year-end sum of $44 million, Erie County banked the equivalent of 19 cents from every property tax dollar charged in 2009. It appears to be the largest surplus since the $51 million recorded for the year 2000, following the large-surplus years of County Executive Dennis T. Gorski’s administration.

Comptroller Mark C. Poloncarz, conducting his own analysis, told the Legislature in a letter Wednesday that the year ended with a surplus closer to $40 million, not $44 million, because of certain 2009 obligations Collins has not yet counted.

However, the comptroller’s office each year stresses that the true figure will not be known until the county’s outside auditors complete their work, usually during the summer.

No matter the figure, it was clear that Erie County officials never had their backs to the wall financially in 2009. So some of the elected leaders who don’t line up with Collins questioned why he still transferred or even cut certain services.

For example, Collins wrote some 1,100 children out of a program that subsidizes day care expenses for working poor families because Albany had cut its percentage of support. This year, he’s closing out the medical services offered at two county- run clinics and directing patients to other health care providers.

“I continue to be deeply disappointed that the executive has not agreed to extend child care subsidies with the use of 2009 surplus dollars,” said Maria R. Whyte of Buffalo, the Legislature’s Democratic leader.

“Surplus money is a middle-ground thing,” she said. “Too much surplus means that you are not executing the mission of government. And not enough surplus shows that you have not been as tight as you need to be with fiscal controls. If we had $40 million to spare, then we were not putting that money into the economy the way we should.”

Asked Wednesday if he would consider spending some of the money on public projects that create jobs and stimulate the local economy, Collins said he would consider it depending on the project and his sense of its value to taxpayers.

However, he defended his decision to tighten the eligibility for child care subsidies by stressing that he will not use county tax dollars to cover losses in state or federal aid. As for the clinics, he said services are being moved to other nonprofit providers, not cut entirely.

He also said that if Erie County qualifies for a new round of federal aid for its child care subsidies, he would consider restoring eligibility to prior levels, or near prior levels. “I do believe in the program,” he said.

Meanwhile, Erie County has sued Colgan Air and its insurers to recover some $800,000 in expenses stemming from the crash of Flight 3407 in February 2009, Collins’ aides said.

Among Collins’ uses for the $44 million surplus: paying off an old pension-fund obligation that former County Executive Joel A. Giambra put on an installment plan; paying off some old debt taken out for construction at Erie County Medical Center; and closing a deficit in the road-repair account. Poloncarz’s staff says the $4 million donation to that fund was already required by the 2009 budget, and it’s a big reason why they differ on the size of the surplus.

Collins also will set aside $10 million to alleviate any future property tax increases, which are possible in 2012 and later years. His Republican allies in the County Legislature have championed creation of a “property tax stabilization fund.”