Cuomo To Cities: Drop Dead
So first a little history.
Way back in October of 1975, President Gerald Ford gave a speech making it clear that no Federal bailout would be forthcoming to keep cash-strapped New York City afloat.
The New York Daily News, in its inimitable fashion, distilled Ford’s comments to two blunt words (which Ford never actually uttered): Drop Dead.
Fast forward to 2013 and we find Governor Andrew Cuomo delivering much the same message to school districts, towns and villages across New York.
In a speech last week, Cuomo argued that many local governments and school systems should cease to exist, agreeing to merge or consolidate their operations.
“If you are a school district, or a city, or a town or a county, and you are looking for a fundamental financial reform, consolidation is one of the obvious ones,” Cuomo said.
In a way, this is nothing new. For years — going back to his time as attorney general — Cuomo has decried the thousands of separate and often layered taxing jurisdictions in New York.
His basic argument is that the balkanized system of 19th-century-era political entities is a costly throw-back and that local officials are on the wrong side of history.
“New York’s antiquated system of local government today consists of more than 10,500 governmental entities. This oversized and inefficient bureaucracy is a luxury taxpayers cannot afford,” Cuomo has argued.
In one sense, Cuomo is clearly correct. New York does have a crazy high number of local taxing jurisdictions when compared with states of comparable population.
Many of these entities are zombie jurisdictions. School districts with only a handful of kids. Towns that barely exist in any meaningful sense.
Hamilton County, here in the North Country, has a county government, ten different towns and a half-dozen school districts, all for a population of roughly 5,000 people.
The people of Saranac Lake, meanwhile, are represented by two towns, two counties, a village and a school district. For those communities, Cuomo’s message is clear. The fiscal crisis isn’t a crisis. It’s an opportunity. This from the Associated Press:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo had tough words Friday for local officials facing fiscal crises and seeking more help from Albany, telling them they should consolidate services or whole governments and school districts rather than looking for relief from Albany.
Sounds like simple, tough medicine.
But in fact, the “crisis” that Cuomo is leveraging to “right size” local government in New York state is partly of his making.
Early in his first term, Cuomo pushed through a 2% property tax cap, one of his signature achievements, but he also failed to deliver on promises of mandate reform.
So even when local governments and districts merge, Albany still forces them to do a lot of costly, wasteful things, and refuses to grant local leaders the flexibility to find more efficient solutions.
It’s also a simple fact that Albany has decentralized more and more essential government services to the local level, so that counties and towns are performing many of the front-line social and public safety functions that people rely upon.
As state aid has flattened, local governments have been forced to downsize things like home care for seniors. Nursing homes have been privatized or closed.
“Talk of consolidation is just an avoidance action by the state so they can avoid the real problem of state mandates,” Peter Baynes of the New York Conference of Mayors told the AP last week.
“If you talk to any local government in New York state, they can rattle off the consolidations they’ve made and they are squeezing all the savings they can out of shared services.”
That probably overstates the case. There are still a lot of bend-in-the-road local taxing jurisdictions that have outlived their usefulness. Cuomo clearly wants to see more of those governments killed off before he offers relief.
But as the governor’s “off with their heads” approach to local government faces one final hurdle: the will of the people.
Again and again, here in the North Country and elsewhere, voters have flat rejected consolidations and mergers by overwhelming margins.
Earlier this month, voters in Glens Falls rejected a modest school district consolidation — which had reasonably strong support from local leaders and from the Glens Falls Post Star’s editorial board — by roughly 4-to-1.
So tough rhetoric aside, it’s an open question whether Cuomo’s “starve the beast” approach to taking down local governments will work.
And it’s an open question whether consolidations and mergers will produce the kind of cost savings that will allow communities to continue providing essential services without more aid and flexibility in Albany.
I have never really been sure what the purpose of a “town” is in NYS. I understand villages you get some police, water, sewer, roads, I understand county, you get your social services, roads, sheriff dept, etc. What do towns do? I guess some roads?
The town’s purpose is to continue to exist.
“I do think this would be very hard I have no illusions but I also think this is essentially what the State is telling us to do.”
Yes, but they’re not telling us how to do it.
Think about the complexity. You’ve got two counties and six towns involved the the school district already. To that you’d be adding two more counties and, at least four more towns (I’m not real clear on the Tupper and Placid school district lines.) How in the world do you get all these cats headed in the same direction at the same time?
Education mandates aren’t just abut special ed. They cut across the whole spectrum of education from special ed to phys ed and out into the halls between classes. And they have gotten very much worse this school year.
For instance: New student progress tracking plans (which are tied to new teacher evaluation structures) require phenomenally more time for classroom teachers and administrators. Not only do teachers now have to spend more time on data entry regarding student attendance, participation and achievement, the software they are required to use constantly crashes and often requires teachers, administrators & tech personnel to spend more hours at school. (Aren’t you glad we don’t pay them overtime?) Districts have spent thousands on training and software to get teachers ready for these requirements and the upshot is that while the plan was to force improvement of teacher performance, it has sucked the life force out of almost every teacher I know.
For instance: The state now requires districts to have rigid plans in place for all teacher/student interventions that includes training on district approved intervention strategies. This training covers everything from where it is acceptable to place your hand on a student’s arm to get their attention if they are spiraling out of control to very highly choreographed multi-staff “take down dances” that must be used when a student needs to be restrained. If a student has a special need (a recent injury or physical difference) staff needs to seek counsel from an outside agency on alternative restraining techniques and obtain approval to use them before a crisis occurs. Districts are again paying outside “experts” tens of thousands of dollars to micromanage situations before they arise.
Many local school have assistant principals and what looks like a top heavy administrative staff precisely because of all of these non-special ed related mandates. The paperwork requirements are overwhelming. There are other mandates that are poverty related and require extra programs and student tracking that do not apply to larger, wealthier districts and our poor, rural schools we don’t get extra state money to manage those demands, either.
I grew up in California where there are two entities, cities and counties. It was probably 20 years living in upstate NY (Syracuse) before I realized there was such a thing as a town – a layer between the county and city. There are also villages and hamlets. There is certainly no apriori need for an entity smaller than a county but bigger than a village.
It seems as if the number of dollars going into eduction has increased dramatically beyond just funding school districts. For instance testing; why not consider just using already existing secured, standardized, normed exams like ACT, SAT, ASVAB and doing away the creation of another set of exams that reinvent the wheel. It would seem as though a large amount of the increase in dollars spent on education actually goes to groups that do not have anything to do with educating students.
Thanks V.
I don’t know what the answer is at this point though? It looks as if the state by its actions wants our schools to fold? They won’t provide mandate relief and they won’t fund our schools in a way to pay for the mandates or what is required. I don’t think they do want our schools to fold, but the only message I can see from their actions is that they pointedly forcing consolidation?
Or maybe I am just over thinking the whole thing? Maybe the State just does not care, we are small and politically unimportant and just basically crushed by the state system?
I’m pretty sure dissolving towns would require some changes in state law. When communities have looked at maybe doing a co-terminus village and town instead of dissolving a village, they still need to keep a town clerk and maybe a judge, too, in place, even if they were to get rid of every other semblance of town government. Plus, there’s that quirk of New York State law that towns can’t run fire departments, so any village’s department would have to switch to a Board of Commissioners system if it were to dissolve, creating another taxing entity and layer of government.
I agree that getting rid of towns would make sense in rural and more sparsely populated areas, like the Adirondacks, where the town government’s role is usually pretty limited. No reason to have villages, towns and a county, all next to each other, fixing and plowing roads when one larger entity could do it just as well, it seems.
Also, like I think somebody mentioned, dissolving towns gets rid of the common objection to dissolving a village — it often does make taxes go up for the townsfolk, since villages usually provide services that a town doesn’t. That’s one of the reasons to live in a population center and not a rural area, you pay more but you get more. If you could dissolve the town instead, have the county take over the town government’s fairly limited functions and the village could stay in place, well I don’t see a real downside.
Actually, I can think of one downside of getting rid of a town that we’d have to figure out a solution to — judges. You’d still need them, particularly in rural areas where it’s a long trip to find another community that has one. Even with all the towns we already have, in a lot of areas police have problems when they arrest someone at night and the local judge isn’t available to arraign them.
Not sure what the best solution would be — maybe keeping local judges but getting rid of other functions of town government? Maybe some kind of county-based circuit judge system? We’d have to figure it out, but I don’t think it’s an insurmountable problem or a reason to keep towns exactly as they are now.