State officials want to give municipal officials and voters a simpler, more efficient tool to reorganize and strip away layers of local government and to chip away at the property tax burden that weighs on New York residents and businesses.
Yet that new tool, packaged in the New New York Government Reorganization and Citizen Empowerment Act passed by the Assembly and Senate last week, might not best accomplish its intended work of streamlining government services at long-term savings to taxpayers, according to some of its lukewarm supporters. That might be done instead by sharing services among existing towns, villages, counties and school districts, they said.  Â
The bill, championed and drafted by state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo with Gov. David Paterson”™s support, makes it easier for both local governing bodies, such as town and village boards, and petitioning voters to act within specified time frames to consolidate or dissolve taxing entities, subject to majority approval in a voter referendum. The legislation spells out the procedural mechanics that municipalities and voters can use to voluntarily eliminate some of the more than 10,500 local taxing entities in New York. Cuomo called that mazelike tax-levying system dysfunctional and “too expensive, confusing, inefficient and susceptible to waste, fraud and abuse.”
                Â
The law, however, excludes the largest single source of local property taxes, school districts, from consolidation or dissolution initiatives. City districts and county-created special-purpose districts also are excluded from the new law”™s sweep.
At Pattern for Progress, a nonprofit public-policy research and planning institute in Newburgh that serves a nine-county Hudson Valley region, officials are managing a five-consultant study to identify possible shared services among Ulster County, the city of Kingston and 12 other Ulster municipalities. Cuomo”™s consolidation bill provides a voluntary alternative approach to reducing costs for governments and taxpayers, said Pattern for Progress President and CEO Jonathan Drapkin.
“If this bill helps to make it easier for those communities that want to do it, that”™s a good thing,” he said. “Right now the process is too cumbersome”¦That”™s not to say that everybody should consolidate.”
Drapkin said the Cuomo bill incorporates some recommendations for cost-saving reforms made by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer”™s Commission on Local Government Efficiency and Competiveness, on which Drapkin served. “These are ideas that have been put forward for a long time,” he said. In 1935, a state Commission for the Revision of the Tax Laws reported the state”™s local government system was “so contrary to principles of human organization that it is difficult if not impossible for the administration of public affairs to be carried on with efficiency.”
With municipal revenue and taxpayers”™ income declining in the recession, “The economy at the moment is probably one of the single largest contributors to having people think seriously about this, when they were not thinking about this in the past,” Drapkin said.
“It”™s a good initiative,” attorney and Westchester County Association Chairman Alfred B. DelBello said of the consolidation bill, “but I don”™t think it”™s going to have the results that people expect because it requires people to vote out of existence their own municipalities. I don”™t think that”™s going to happen. That”™s why I think the shared-services approach is better at reducing costs.”
“But it”™s a good initiative,” said DelBello, who also served on the Spitzer commission on local government efficiency. “We need every tool we can get in bringing these municipal costs under control.”
Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano said, “I think everything should be in the mix,” referring to the exclusion of schools.
Their exclusion “is political,” he said following remarks at a shared-services conference in White Plains.Â
“Conceptually we”™re right on board” with the Cuomo bill, Spano said. County officials, though have concerns about some of the bill”™s details that are shared by at least one village mayor in Westchester and a state senator from the county who, despite her reservations and initial opposition, voted for the measure last week.
Spano and state Sen. Suzi Oppenheimer, said the number of resident petitioners needed to require local governments to schedule a public hearing and vote on consolidation or dissolution ”“ the lesser of 10 percent or 5,000 registered voters, or 20 percent for taxing entities with 500 or fewer electors ”“ should be raised. Oppenheimer said she preferred a petitioner requirement in the 20 percent to 25 percent range.
Westchester officials also are concerned that the law sets no time limit for petitioners to collect signatures for reorganization, while opponents of change have only 45 days and must collect at least 25 percent of voters”™ signatures to petition for a second referendum on a consolidation or dissolution plan. Oppenheimer said that petition period should be extended to 90 days.
Rather than the consolidation route, “We feel this is a better way to operate,” Spano said, pointing to the array of shared-service offerings presented by county departments at last week”™s conference. Provided free of charge to municipalities, those services include assistance and cost-saving coordination in purchasing and supplies, emergency services, environmental facilities and laboratory services, information technology, archives and records management, transportation, planning, public works and public safety.
Despite its flaws, the Cuomo bill “raises the level of awareness and discussion,” Spano said.Â
Oppenheimer said state officials need to take “a hard look” at a provision in the bill that authorizes county governments to abolish entire units of local government, including cities, towns, villages and special districts, if approved by voters in a countywide referendum.
Spano said Westchester County government never would assert that power unless asked to do so by a local governing body.
Shortly before it went to the Senate floor last week, Oppenheimer said she would vote in favor of the bill, despite its “potential to create chaos at the local level,” after receiving commitments from Cuomo and Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith to amend the adopted law in the nine-month period before it takes effect.
