The front page of this mornings BUF News is interesting. It seems like Erie County/WNY (Giambra, Gaughn, others) have been talking about mergers, regionalization, etc for 10 years or so and now the state is taking an interest. I think we just have to start making it happen. I think the local communities would rather do it themselves, than have the state 'force it' to happen.

State commission says mergers are key to any tax relief Proposals in report offer radical change to way state operates
By Tom Precious - NEWS ALBANY BUREAU
Updated: 04/20/08 9:29 AM

ALBANY — A state commission will recommend 76 ways to control spiraling property taxes as it calls for dramatic — and politically challenging — efforts to merge cities, villages, towns and school districts.

Mergers of local governments should be made easier to accomplish, local government employees should pay more of their own health insurance costs and union contracts should be renegotiated if local governments consolidate, the New York State Commission on Local Government Efficiency and Competitiveness will recommend.

A draft report obtained by The Buffalo News outlines 76 ways that rising local government and school district costs can be shaved to give relief to New York’s property taxpayers, one of the most heavily taxed groups in the nation. The final report is expected to be publicly presented in a week to Gov. David A. Paterson.

Acting on the report may be difficult, though, because the recommendations step on the toes of many powerful interests, including public employee unions, politicians accustomed to control over patronage jobs, and a long tradition about New York’s local governments.

But beleaguered taxpayers also are an important interest group, the commission notes, and a different climate may be emerging that is receptive for solutions.

“Citizens are demanding change, because they are frustrated by their local tax burden, which is the highest in the nation. They also want modern, efficient services and more progress on issues that must be addressed regionally, like economic growth and quality of life,” the report said.

It also may be difficult for Albany to ignore the report’s ideas, since the commission’s members were appointed not only by the executive branch, but by the legislative leaders of the Senate and Assembly and the state comptroller. Former Lt. Gov. Stan Lundine of Jamestown headed the panel, and its 15 members include state lawmakers, local government officials, academics and business executives.

Representatives of the commission and the governor’s staff said they would not comment until after the report is officially released, in about a week.

The draft report includes major and minor changes needed — from local governments and from Albany — to rein in the cost of running localities.

Consolidation is recommended not just for cities, towns and villages but also for the state’s 698 school districts, which levy the biggest local property tax hit. Consolidating two, 900-pupil districts can save 9 percent, and merging smaller districts can save taxpayers as much as 20 percent, the commission noted.

The draft plan would give the state education commissioner the power to order school district mergers based on new criteria that look at pupil performance, enrollment and high tax burdens. The recom-

mendation calls for more regional high schools and creation of local committees of school officials and parents to consider how school operations can be consolidated. Schools would be in line for more money, or in the words of the draft report, “significant incentive,” if they consolidate.

The report also calls for regional collective bargaining agreements for school districts, which would “level the playing field” across communities while giving teachers more “flexible career paths” and more money for working in certain urban and rural areas that are now hard to staff. Other recommendations:

• Merge industrial development agency offices into regional groups to end the practice of one community luring a company away from another nearby community.

• Convert town and county positions of highway superintendent, assessor, town clerk, tax receiver and coroner to appointed jobs and create countywide 911 call centers.

• Eliminate local government civil service commissions in communities with fewer than 100,000 residents, and require voter approval for them in larger municipalities, as a way to reduce redundancy.

• Create regional jails instead of county-funded jails, with the ultimate goal being a single, statewide jail system managed by the state.

• Permit collective bargaining agreements to be re-opened if local operations, like police and fire, merge.

• Create a petition process that residents can use to dissolve or consolidate local governments and only let new villages be created if approved by a vote of the entire town, not just those living in the proposed new village.

• Eliminate local boards of elections in administering state and local elections. Instead, a single, apolitical state official would run statewide contests — and only one official in each county — to end political gridlock that occurs now in partisan-split boards.

Former Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer created the commission under an executive order a year ago and gave it a six-member staff. The commission was charged not just with finding ways to lower the property tax burden, but also how to make local government services more efficient. The draft report notes that New York’s system of running local governments was created during the era of horse-drawn transportation and is in need of a major overhaul.

“Over the years, as conditions have changed, our solution to this outdated structure has been to add to it frequently, with additional governmental units, special districts, local public authorities and other entities, producing a complex amalgamation which obscures responsibility, reduces accountability and raises equity concerns for basic public services split between many entities and elected officials,” the draft report concludes.

New York today boasts 5,528 different local government entities — far more than the 4,200 the commission believed existed when its work began last year. They include 1,607 general purpose units, like counties and villages, another 1,804 special purpose entities, like school and fire districts, and 2,117 “other” entities, which include community colleges, IDAs and water and sewer authorities. The numbers don’t include thousands of more government entities, like planning boards and soil and water districts.

New York is one of only 10 states where residents can live in three layers of local governments — counties, towns and villages — at the same time.

Erie County leads the state with 939 special districts, and they accounted for 32 percent of the $440 million in tax revenues collected by towns in 2004, according to a state comptroller’s office report last year.

When the commission releases its report, it will also put out several research papers, including one that looks at the failed plan several years ago to consolidate Buffalo and Erie County. The paper, which was not available, said that consolidation idea had so many unanswered questions that “momentum for the consolidation faded.”

Change in spending

One national regionalism expert praised New York for thinking more seriously about ways to consolidate and share services, but says that will have little impact unless officials address spending.

“The problem isn’t where the boxes are. The problem is the political culture of spending money they don’t have and trying to make it sound like they’re not responsible,” said John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee who runs a national group that works on neighborhood planning and anti-sprawl efforts.

The quickest way to slow property taxes, he said, would be to require every government entity in New York to keep spending below the inflation rate.

“They have to discipline them- selves. That should be the moral imperative,” Norquist said.

While the report’s ideas could save money, he added: “It’s not going to solve the problem. There has to be a new ethic of paying bills on time, not pushing things off to the next generation to pay.”

Cutting ‘cost drivers’

The report also looks at problems in the fire and emergency protection services locally, suggesting countywide fire systems to improve services while retaining volunteer systems.

And the report looks at what it calls “cost drivers” for local government.

For one of the biggest — worker health insurance plans — it calls for a minimum 10 percent contribution by individuals and 25 percent for family policies, to be phased in over five years.

Local government employee health insurance costs rose from $2.9 billion to $4.9 billion between 2000 and 2005, the report notes. By requiring employees to contribute more, as in private industry, localities in New York could save $475 million annually.

The commission said 53 percent of localities do not require employee health insurance contributions.

The panel is also set to recommend a new pension tier — one in which new state and local government employees would have to contribute to their pension plans to slow the “relatively rich” benefits local employees now receive.

In addition, the draft report recommends the complete elimination of the union-backed Wicks Law, which drives up the cost of public construction projects by requiring multiple contracts for the work. The recent state budget raised the threshold limits under which Wicks would not apply — $500,000 for upstate projects and $3 million in New York City.

That change will do little to cut costs for taxpayers, critics say.

In the end, localities must be given more powers and “a clear process” from Albany to consolidate operations or share services with others. New York’s local government system “holds to boundaries, rules and a scale of operations” long outdated, the report said. “This anachronistic [system] carries a price, because many local services could be provided more efficiently and effectively on a broader scale,” the draft report states.

tprecious@buffnews.com