Only Mostly Dead

According to the Daily Star, the Kosmer Plan is done. To paraphrase Mark Twain, those reports of its demise may have been exaggerated.

Here's what happened. There was no plan to vote on, or officially launch, any part of the plan at the regular Board meeting on Wednesday. Since it is a time-sensitive plan, this would seriously delay any kind of implementation. I moved that we suspend the rules in order to consider a Resolution putting the plan into action. All but one Representative voted to suspend the rules (both the rule requiring any Resolutions to be available for review three days before the meeting, and the rule requiring any Resolution to come from a Board committee), which I took as a good sign. This meant that we were ready and willing to debate the plan.

The Resolution simply put the plan as written into action. Opposition seemed to focus on the difficulty of individual pieces of the plan – negotiating successfully with the CSEA, creating a poll that could produce reliable results, and then getting the state legislature to approve our 0.25% sales tax increase.

It's true that any one of these steps would be very difficult. That is not, in my opinion, a reason to abandon the effort altogether. And there are reasons to think that it might be successful.

The CSEA should be motivated to cooperate on a plan that would keep the Manor in public hands; they will no longer be able to represent any of the Manor staff once it's sold to a private operator. They have already given some indication of their willingness to talk about it.

Organizations do polls all the time, and we have many experts available to help us word the questions and design the system that would produce a reliable result.

And it is true that Senator Seward has said that he would not support – nor introduce into the Senate – a bill supporting our tax increase this session. But we've all heard of politicians who were 'for it before they were against it,' or vice-versa, and five months is a very long time in the political world. And it's also true that no sales tax increase has been approved by the legislature in five years. But it's also true that never before has a request for a sales tax increase been sent to Albany by a county which has renegotiated a CSEA contract and shown that a vast majority of its citizens support it. As John Kosmer said at the meeting, “That would be state-wide headlines.”

So it's difficult, but not impossible. The County Board, by a relatively slim margin, has rejected it. But the first step – renegotiating the CSEA contract – can be initiated by the union itself. If they are interested in pursing a plan like this, and can assemble a proposal in time – a proposal which would only go into effect if and when the County suspended its search for buyers – the plan could rise again, because at that point there would no doubt be renewed interest in the poll and the sales tax increase.

There's a difference between 'dead' and 'mostly dead.' The CSEA still has a chance to play Miracle Max, taking the initiative the County Board has chosen not to take.