Consolidation creeps closer

 

As the first vote on the fate of the village in over a generation approaches, final preparations are coming into place and voters are going to have to sit with the information they have as they make their decision.

Several public sessions are planned:

• Oct. 13, 2 p.m., Woodland Pond
• Oct. 20, 6 p.m., Lecture Center 108, SUNY New Paltz
• Oct. 22, 6:30 p.m., community center
• Oct. 20, 4 p.m., Van Den Berg Hall, SUNY New Paltz

Post cards a "situation"

Mayor Alex Wojcik reported at the Oct. 7 village board meeting that the promise of post cards has become complicated. Trustees had committed to spending $1,000, believed to be half of the total cost to send an informational piece out to all residents, but it seems that delivering to all addresses in the more rural outer parts of the town will be much more expensive. The total, as reported to Wojcik by the deputy supervisor, will be $4,361.03. Trustees have declined to pay half of that total bill on the recommendation of the village treasurer, who advised that $83,323.69 has already been spent on consolidation. Instead, they are committing to getting post cards out to village residents directly.

Trustee Allen Ross, a supporter of consolidation, agreed with that assessment but appeared torn. "The problem is that I am using words like 'we' or 'they,'" Ross said, and that's a dichotomy the trustee feels would disappear if the village layer of government were to be folded into the town. However, Ross recognized that trustees must represent their own constituents, and that paying the additional posted to reach residents outside beyond that remit was not appropriate.

The NYCOM position

Wojcik also read from an opinion prepared through the New York Conference of Mayors, which while linked in the agenda, was not accessible to without authorization. According to the mayor's recounting, the opinion suggests that consolidating governments with similar population bases—such as two rural populations, or two more dense areas—would be more likely to be a smooth process.

"That's the United States," said Ross, who rejected the suggestion that that made it a bad idea. Among the examples Ross offered was being able to have a voice in things that impact the viewshed from the village, or the urbanization of the downtown, for those who do not live in those particular areas. Moreover, Ross noted that given the concentration of residents in what's now the village, it appears unlikely that their democratic voice would be silenced if only one government ruled the community.

To Wojcik, the density of the village makes services like water and sewer possible, and that's why the village exists. Ross countered that the town has millions of dollars that had been held in fund balance, and that money might be more equitably distributed throughout the community without the us-or-them mentality imposed by the presence of two governments.

Funding

Supervisor Rogers has frequently spoken about "counterintuitive funding models" that exist when there's a village in a town. Wojcik has raised some of these to support the preservation of the village. While state grants to improve leaking sewer lines rely on the income levels in census tracts—because they draw on federal money—not all grants use the same formula, the mayor explained. Some funding relies on the independence of the village as an impoverished jurisdiction, and the mayor anticipates that if the village goes away, some sources of money do as well.

The labor question

Village employees are worried about the future, and that's been enough of an argument for many to plan to vote against consolidation. Union members have rejected it formally, and employees who have spoken on condition of anonymity have expressed a lack of confidence that Rogers will come through with a promised contract that preserves everything they now have under a new government. As has been noted many times, there's a lot that must be trusted to future town leaders to ensure should consolidation occur.

However, the supervisor is working toward negotiating a contract that captures the best features of the current town and village agreements. When asked for comment, Rogers acknowledged having said in the past that this would be needed for this vote to happen at all. It's too late to stop the vote now, but the supervisor did say that if such an agreement is not reached, then Rogers would no longer support consolidating the governments.

Another issue that lingers, though, is that of shop leadership. On the public works side, employees have been under a single appointed superintendent for decades, and would be moving to a structure overseen by someone who is elected—and may or may not be good at managing. Rogers has indicated that eliminating the elected highway superintendent could have been included in this plan, but was left out to minimize its complexity.

Financial and administrative employees in the village are now overseen by a clerk-treasurer who gets high marks all around, and who will likely retire. The town's comptroller continues to operate under a cloud, as having worked on the town board to create that as a civil service position, resign to take the job, only to fail the test. It was then restructured not to be a civil service job at all in order to retain the same person.

Village employees of all stripes appear uneasy with who they might be working for after consolidation.

Fire control

The consolidation plan calls for the existing fire company to be transformed into an entity that would handle fire management contracts, much like is done with the rescue squad. The fire chief has said that the decision was made not to evaluate that proposal unless consolidation is a sure thing, because it's going to result in high legal bills that taxpayers aren't going to cover. Voters will have to make their decision without any outside experts weighing in on this question.

Practice what you preach, please

As I have said before, opponents to consolidation have some good points despite the fact that some of them have their own agendas.  But despite this being a college town, apparently no one in this debate has a clue how to educate.

A letter to the New Paltz Times a couple of weeks ago put forth a beef with the process:  the writers would ask specific questions about the finances, and be told to watch the videos of the meetings if they wanted an answer.  It's not unreasonable to be irritated by that sort of response; it's lazy, it's obfuscatory, and it ignores the fact that residents who didn't have the time to attend those meetings aren't going to have the time to watch them, either.

On top of that, the New Paltz Government Efficiency Project site, which should be the central repository for all of this information, is "undergoing maintenance" as of this writing, and has been for days, if not longer.

I thought the solution to this overwhelming sea of data would be New Paltz Fact Check, the blog set up "in order to inform public discourse, policy, and decision making by providing factual, objective analysis of issues important to New Paltz," according to its about page.  But if there's analysis, objective or otherwise, I can't find it.

What I see instead is a vast number of links and documents, many of which wouldn't be available to the public otherwise.  Internal emails, commentary from a Facebook group, public comments, and letters to the editor all in one place.  It's useful to have all this information in front of me, but where's the analysis I was promised?

The problem of analysis, or lack thereof, plagues both camps during this debate.  Don't we have a college in New Paltz?  Aren't there tenured professors and licensed teachers packed thickly in our voter rolls?  Isn't there anyone willing to step up and walk the voting public through the numbers, rather than just expecting us to wade through gigabytes of data without context?

It's unacceptable to champion either viewpoint in this cause without providing meaningful education to the voters.  It's disingenuous for the "yes" camp to expect the public to support this initiative when largely we don't have the time to dig in to the mounds of data.  It's hypocritical for the "no" camp to complain about this lack of analysis, claim to do something about it, and then just add to the problem.

Voters in this community are getting the message that we aren't bright enough to comprehend this mammoth problem, but the truth is, we just don't have as much time on our hands as the volunteers and elected officials (not to mention the paid consultants) do to wrap our minds around it.

Here's an unambiguous request to any and all who are invested in the consolidation question:  don't insult the voting public, educate us.

No good idea goes unpunished

I first expressed support for unification in 2008 or thereabouts; I have always believed that simplifying our lives by having one less government to deal with made a tremendous amount of sense.

Of course, I wasn't factoring in the human element.

The egos and personalities which strut across the New Paltz stage make it damned near to impossible to come up with a solution that will work.  Much of the information put forth by the pro-unification factions is correct.  On the other hand, many of the concerns expressed by the keep-it-separate crowd are legitimate and should not be dismissed.  It's bloody hard to figure out what information to discuss when there are so many people pushing hidden agendas.

Does our mayor want to keep his job?  Of course!  He himself told me that the village is the largest entity he would be comfortable running, because he can "keep it all in my head," in his words.  He knows every drainage grate, he said to me, and couldn't imagine being an effective elected official on a scale where that's not possible.  So there's no question that Jason West is going to fight tooth and nail against consolidation.

But to suggest that West's information and arguments should be entirely discarded because he has an ulterior motive, or because he is arrogant and condescending, does not serve this community well.  Don't consider the source, just evaluate his rationale.

How about Susan Zimet?  She is unabashedly in support of a merger, and doesn't have any personal stake the way the rest of us do, because she doesn't even live here.  Succeeding in this drive will put a feather in her political cap and, in all likelihood, be used as evidence of her wonderfulness when she pursues higher office.  And pursue she shall:  Zimet has always been ambitious, and returned to town government more because the county legislature lost power in the charter government than out of a burning desire to clean house.

Does this make her positions on unification automatically worthless?  If you consider the source it does, but considering the source does not do justice to the information itself.  Like West, Zimet's talking points and actual data must be carefully looked at, whether you like her or not, whether you trust her or not.

There are other players, as well.  One group makes a logo to support a unified government, another group makes a parody, and suddenly people are talking about consulting attorneys over it.  That sort of talk is shameful, because involving attorneys in a neighborly disagreement squelches free speech.  Many of West's opponents (and Zimet's, to a lesser extent) have used the "fascist" label; the fact that the same people who call their opponents dictators seek to silence the opposition with litigation is sickening.

The fact that this process is inordinately complex makes me fear that no good will come of it.  If you want to ruin a good idea, create a committee to study it.  We created around ten committees, so I'm thinking we really wanted to make this idea unpalatable, or at least incomprehensible to anyone with a day job not dedicated to policy questions.

Unification should be simple.  In this iteration, it's been made anything but, and its supporters are trying to ram it through at breakneck speed without answering perfectly valid questions.  Unless something really big changes, and very soon, I think we would all be better off firing each and every one of our town and village board members and starting over once we've cleaned house.