Buffalo News
Panel says let voters decide on county charter changes
By MATTHEW SPINA
NEWS STAFF REPORTER
7/11/2006
A slogan you probably will hear a lot in coming weeks was pitched time and again Monday in a Buffalo senior center: "Let the voters decide."
With the County Legislature just two days away from voting on a report revamping the government's core rules, the authors implored lawmakers to put all their recommendations before voters in November, regardless of whether legislators agree with them.
"I believe it's time to let the voters decide these issues," said Peter Reese of Buffalo, one of the 23 appointees who formed the Charter Revision Commission, which issued its report last month.
In drafting new rules to prevent yet another Erie County financial crisis, a majority of commissioners recommended ceding many of a county's executive's powers to an appointed and non-political county manager who must please both the executive and Legislature.
Advocates reason that with a professional manager hiring and firing department heads, patronage can be bridled, if not eliminated, in departments that county executives now control, and budgeting can become more fluid. Three financial crises have hit Erie County since the mid-1970s, the latest in 2004-05.
The commission's most radical idea was "the hybrid" - hiring a manager to work with the elected executive. But members also suggest giving the comptroller and Legislature a greater role to root out unrealistic revenue estimates, letting officials elected countywide, such as the sheriff, submit their budgets directly to the Legislature and modernizing the document throughout.
With the Legislature expected to take its first votes on the report Thursday, its leaders held a hearing Monday in Buffalo's Richmond-Summer Community Center for the Elderly. Five citizens delivered wide-ranging comments, but the commissioners who advocate the county manager idea repeatedly urged that voters decide the outcome.
"There's an old maxim that says, "Physician, heal thyself,' " said William R. Greiner, a former University at Buffalo president and commission member who said the Buffalo area must halt the hemorrhage of jobs and young people to other parts of the nation. "I would hope that we would be willing to take some radical action to help ourselves."
The panel was not unanimous. John Maggiore, a Buffalo State College official who voted against the hybrid, said it does too little to limit a county executive's powers, and since the executive can fire the manager, the manager will be pressed to meet his boss' political agenda.
With a manager handling day-to-day affairs, the county executive is to become a policy setter, a sort of "chairman of the board" who responds to the concerns of voters countywide. Advocates of the hybrid also say the executive's pay should shrink from its present $104,000 a year.
But the benefits of a manager could more easily be replicated by strengthening the role and qualifications of the deputy county executive and require that the Legislature confirm their hiring, said Alan Bedenko, a lawyer who runs the blog Buffalo Pundit and spoke for a group called the Western New York Coalition for Progress.
"While Erie County's recent history may indicate that substantial changes in the form of government are appropriate," he said, "we reject that notion as a short-sighted reaction to events created by individuals, not a defect in the county's structural form of governance."
Erie County can find solutions through its political process, said Russell Clemens of Amherst, explaining that the system allows the public to vote out officials doing a bad job.
e-mail: mspina@buffnews.com
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