United We'll Stand

And
so it was last month when Steve McMahon, the town supervisor in the
Cortland County town of Scott, suggested to his neighbors that they
should consider shutting down the town and merging with their neighbors
in Homer. In the process, his job would be eliminated, but that was OK
with him.

McMahon was like a lot of people you run
into if you attend town meetings and school board meetings in small
communities. Everyone thinks they know how to save money. Everyone
knows that the government is spending too much. And everyone has a
story to tell of someone who got paid to do nothing, or retired young
on the public dime, or whose brother-in-law has a no-show job. And then
they get into the position where they actually have to make the cuts,
and they find there’s not as much fat as they thought there was. 

Whenever budgets get tight or taxes are
about to be hiked, the howls get louder. I remember a particularly
contentious school board election in one southeastern Onondaga County
district several years back. Poor administration had led to an
undiscovered budget deficit, and now taxpayers were faced with a 20
percent tax hike to cover current costs plus dig the district out of
its hole.

If you listened to the people at board
meetings, you could have gotten the impression that the only ones who
didn’t know how to save the taxpayers money were those on the school
board and in the administration. One guy got so angry he decided to run
for the school board. He won, and diligently dug into the budget line
by line, sure there were hidden costs and therefore savings, to be
extracted from the budget. Sure enough, he found that what he had been
told was true: The cuts that were easy to make had already been made,
and the ones that were hard to make were not going to be allowed by the
voters.

I had a simpler method to find out if
there was much waste going on. At a half-dozen board meetings and in a
flyer distributed around town, I offered a $100 reward to the person
who could identify a bloated line item in the budget, develop a
strategy to reduce it, and then carry it out. So many people were
convinced that their school taxes were being wasted that I was sure I
would be flooded with applicants for the reward.

I never had to spend the money. Nobody came up with a plan. 

But Steve McMahon has a plan, and he’s
got his neighbors, the state attorney general, the Assembly, the Senate
and, hopefully soon, the governor on his side. He wants his town to
take advantage of a new state law that allows villages and towns to
consider merging or consolidating. Under the new law, in most towns and
villages it would take only 10 percent of the voters to sign a petition
in order for the idea of consolidation to get on the ballot.

McMahon’s idea has a good chance of
lowering taxes because it recognizes a truth he discovered when he took
over as supervisor—that the savings in government are to be found not
by buying fewer paper clips, but through consolidation. McMahon writes
to his fellow townspeople that Scott was formed in 1815 when it broke
off from the town of Preble, when it was near impossible to make it
over the hill to get to town meetings in winter. Today we have snow
tires and telephones, not to mention an aging population that needs tax
relief. 

So let’s hear it for Steve McMahon. Any
other brave souls out there want to offer their jobs for the sake of
consolidation? There are some rumblings in Fabius, where county
Legislator Bob DeMore, who took over Dale Sweetland’s seat two years
ago, is pushing for a study on whether the villages of Tully and Fabius
might be better off consolidating with their respective towns. County
Executive Joanie Mahoney and her lieutenant Ben Dublin managed to get
the town of Clay to merge its police with the County Sheriff’s
Department last year.

And then there are the fire districts,
and the school districts (which are not included in the current law).
According to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, there are more than 10,000
distinct-governing bodies in the state, from sewer districts on up.
Consolidation could save, according to a state commission review,
perhaps a billion dollars a year. The new law, and some common-sense
heroes like Steve McMahon, could go a long way toward creating more
efficient government.