FROM LOHUD.COM--PHIL REISMAN ON ABOLISHING COUNTY GOVERNMENT

Task force may be the beginning of the end for wasteful county government
By Phil Reisman
Journal News columnist • April 8, 2008

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Some years ago, an ambitious study called Westchester 2000 looked into ways of streamlining the county's disparate municipal governments and school districts.

It was a top-down concept, aimed mainly at consolidating services on the local level. The goal was to slow down runaway taxes, but in the end only a handful of suggestions were ever adopted.


Perhaps the time has come to flip Westchester 2000 on its side. Why not look at the issue from the bottom up and examine the possibility of abolishing county government? Give it a name - Westchester 2100.

As it happens, something along the lines of a Westchester 2100 is already in motion.

Greenburgh Town Supervisor Paul Feiner and Yonkers City Councilwoman Joan Gronowski yesterday announced the formation of a citizens' task force whose mission will be to weigh the pros and cons of doing away with a top-heavy and increasingly unpopular layer of government, a juggernaut of patronage that carries a $1.8 billion budget as well as a great deal of political baggage.

Feiner has been a voice in the wilderness for years, ever since 1990 when he served on the county Board of Legislators and had an epiphany about the inherent weakness and costly redundancy of county government in relation to the state's overarching power.

At that time, the state refused to permit Westchester to initiate a bipartisan, property-tax stabilization act, which hinged on increasing the sales tax by 1.5 percent. As a result, the county was faced with the prospect of drastically raising property taxes or laying off workers.

In an op-ed piece he wrote, Feiner recalled an instance in 1974 when the county sought to change the name of the Department of Transit to the Department of Transportation. The county board had to hold a public hearing and send a home-rule request up to Albany for approval. After Senate and Assembly committees met on the "issue," the bill was finally signed into law by the governor.

The absurdity of this is obvious.

And now Feiner, with Gronowski's support, has renewed his proposal to kill off county government altogether because, as he put it in a press statement, "about 75 percent of county government functions" are already mandated by the state and federal governments. To them, the question of what county government does and why it is needed is only rhetorical. The state's already in charge, so why have a superfluous layer between local municipalities and Albany?

Feiner's critics would say his timing represents a clever attempt to deflect political fallout from a 21.5 percent tax increase that was imposed in his own town last month. The county property tax rate in Yonkers, where Gronowski is serving her first term on the council, just shot up 24 percent, causing a loud collective groan from the city populace.

Political motives aside, there may be a perfect storm brewing. Three factors are feeding the storm - a persistent unrest about high taxes in general, a spike in anxiety brought about by predictions that we are fast slipping into a long-term recession, if we're not in the midst of one already, and a perception of governmental arrogance exacerbated by such figures as county board Chairman Bill Ryan, whose rapid expansion of the legislative branch has included a recent effort to secure a substantial pay raise for himself and other legislators.

What's unclear is whether the storm will peter out before it strikes Ryan and the other denizens of the Michaelian Office Building. Feiner and Gronowski, who appear to be dead serious, will hold their first meeting at 7:30 p.m. April 30 at the Grinton I. Will Library in Yonkers.

Doing away with county government, as was done in Connecticut, presents a huge, complicated challenge. There are 62 county governments in the state, and not all of them have a county executive or a board of legislators. The level of distaste for county government varies from county to county.

Because of competing interests, mustering a statewide effort would be difficult. For instance, shifting the management of services to the state would raise state income taxes to offset some of the reduction in property taxes. That would be popular in well-off suburban counties like Westchester, where many in the middle class own their own homes, though perhaps not as popular in urban areas.

Getting self-serving politicians to voluntarily put themselves out of business would be nothing short of revolutionary, too. Just try to imagine Andy Spano making a declaration that it's time to pack it in.

This would take a lot of time. That's why I call it Westchester 2100.

But there is an alternative, a kind of halfway measure that doesn't have to be carried out in Albany, but in White Plains. Form a heavyweight panel of legal and financial experts, say, 10 in all, whose mission would be to quietly and methodically study the matter from every conceivable angle and then draft a new county charter to reduce the size of government.

Here's just a few results that could come from this. Playland Amusement Park, a perennial money-loser, could be scaled back to a passive park. The Bee-Line Bus Service could be sold to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Either the county Board of Legislators or the county executive's office could be sent to the dustbin of history.

Retained would be the basics - the county clerks, the courts and district attorney and social services.

The next step would be to release the proposal before a major election, especially if an open seat such as the county executive's job was at stake.

That way the candidates would be forced to take a position on it. This isn't just run-of-the-mill arm twisting. It's more like a sumo match.

Who knows? The Feiner-Gronowski effort may be the start of something big.