Quote Originally Posted by WNYresident View Post
YOu need to define what rich is. When you add up pension payout and items received many people would consider those people "Rich". It's all relative to the person.
Most elected village or town officials don't qualify for public pensions ... outside of Erie County's larger towns and their villages. That's because most of these jobs are part-time with no benies and the salaries are token amounts, probably $200-$500 a month. (Chautauqua County legislators, for example, get paid $800 a month stipends, no benes).

Eliminating a village outside of the big towns in Erie County might eliminate the salaries of the mayor and 3-5 council persons which would total probably < $10-15k. All the other services that village residents get will still have to be provided. In most towns, those services aren't provided to town residents outside the village, so the former village will have to special districts to cover those services: sewer districts, water districts, light districts, sidewalk districts.

The idea of "duplication of services" really doesn't exist outside of the minds of consolidationists like Kevin Gaughan: there's NOT a town building inspector and a village building inspector who both enforce building codes in the village. The town guy does the town while the village guy does the village. Consequently, if the village dissolves, there's still a need for a building inspector to take care of the village, so the town building inspector goes from half-time to full time. The same with the public works and other services. That's why there's no big tax savings when villages dissolve.

Anybody who's ambitious might try a survey of how much the taxes in the former villages of Randolph, East Randolph, and Perrysburg declined since the villages voted to dissolve a few years ago.