Welcome!

Welcome to all who found their way here through my recent constituent mailing.  This is my primary method of communicating with all of you.  I hope you'll browse my thoughts and actions on the Board through these blog posts, and leave comments when you have something to say.  I take comments very seriously, and I'll respond to as many as possible. 

Of course, you can also contact me at the e-mail address link at the top right of the blog.

Hope to hear from you!

LDC Solution Suggestion

I've been reading a lot of detail about the legalities of LDCs lately, as they relate to how the Board will handle the sale of the Manor. It'll all be over, one way or another, on Wednesday, and I've still got the same concerns about this path as I did when I last wrote about it.

However, I've got a partial solution. It turns out that the Board can write anything it wants into the LDC's establishing document. It can configure the Corporation, and its relationship to the Board, any way it wants.

So – what if the LDC's mission was to write and distribute the RFP (request for proposals), vet the bidders, and make a choice among them – and then present that choice to the Board, which will make the final decision?

Harris-Beach has argued against the Board making the final decision regarding the successful bidder, mostly because, in politics, things change. Every Board member is running in November, and we already have two members who are not seeking reelection. We could have a whole new approach come January 1, 2014. 

This is a valid point. However, real democracy is often messy and complicated, and, if we're doing it right, change is actually a reflection of the will of the people. But even more important, the timeline for this sale suggests that a successful bidder will be chosen well before December. After that, the bidder will have to be approved by the NYS Department of Health. That could take a year or more. But the Board approval that I'm suggesting would take place after the LDC has settled on a successful bidder, but before that bidder begins the DoH process.

At this moment in time, a majority of the Board is willing to hand off the Manor decision to an LDC. Why wouldn't we be willing to affirm that decision – and take responsibility for it – with one vote?

Head Start in Oneonta

You've probably heard about the sequester cuts in funding to Opportunities for Otsego for Head Start, which it administers. The news made the front page of the Star, above the fold.  Head Start money doesn't go through the County (as much Federal money does), so I'm just a spectator to this tragedy. Job losses, families in unnecessary turmoil.

I'm also a citizen of a democracy, so I wrote our Senators and Congressman. Here's what I wrote:

My anger and frustration with the sequester came to a head yesterday when I discovered that, due to the reduction in Federal grants funding Head Start, Oneonta Head Start will have to lay off eight people, and deny day care service to thirty two families, starting on July 1.

My wife and I have worked with Head Start, in a number of ways, for decades. These are people who work hard for pitifully low wages, and do a lot of good for a lot of kids. For the most part, these folks are holding on the best they can, economically. Those who are laid off will struggle with unemployment, and many of those families will fall (or be pushed?) into poverty. The families who depended on the high-quality day care will have their lives transformed, and not in a good way. There is no job-creating going on here – just the opposite.

Congress and the Administration created the sequester with the thought that fear of the consequences of really draconian and irrational cuts would motivate them to cut a deal to avoid the pain. The truth is, the sequester is designed to focus the pain on the most vulnerable, the least resilient, the least able to adapt and adjust.

This is not the way we serve our constituents.  Please exhibit the courage and leadership necessary to right this wrong.

I sent that off on Wednesday; today I read that Congress has manged to find a way to lessen the impact of the sequester on themselves and other middle and upper class Americans. This morning, I wrote to our representatives again:

You have found a way to shuffle sequestered funds in the Transportation Department so that Senators and Congressmen, and other middle and upper class Americans, don't have to wait as long at the airport.

Now it's time to find the same flexibility in the Department of Health and Human Services so that the Oneonta Head Start doesn't have to lay of 8 people and leave 32 families without daycare starting July 1.

It's important for you to understand that, here in the real world, extraordinary action on the behalf of the privileged and lack of action on behalf of the vulnerable and disadvantaged looks just like that.

Please do the right thing.

If you have a moment, please get involved. As usual, many voices can make it work right.

Centralizing Processes

This probably takes the prize as the most boring title of any of my blog posts. I'll be brief and, I hope, concise.

I've been able to attend the regular meetings of a lot of different committees in the last few months (in addition to the ones I am assigned to). On a number of occasions, there has been discussion of applying processes and procedures in a consistent manner; usually the conversation came up because, somewhere, they were not. There are rules and structures that govern most of what we do, from providing services to holding meetings to personnel issues to use of County funds to grant applications, and a hundred other processes that cost us money, time and effort when they're not done right.

I'm a former administrator, so I understand that we're all human, and that dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's can be a frantic and crazy-making burden, and that, frankly, sometimes an organization works better when you've found a way around some of the less useful rules and processes.

However, an organization – and especially a municipality – works much better, with much less waste, (and fewer lawsuits) when there is someone responsible for seeing that all (or at least most) of the details are done right all the way through the organization. In Otsego County, it seems that this is not, often, the case. Department heads need to be experts at everything, not just their department's functioning, and that's not fair, because that's not what they were hired for.

This is all in support of the concept of a County Manager, who would be responsible for all these systems which are not central to the mission of each department, but must be done right. For these reasons alone, a County Manager's work could very well pay for the position. And the County would be more effective in doing the work it's responsible for.

More on this as time goes on.

Ag and County Stats

Don Smyers, Executive Director of Cornell Cooperative Extension of Otsego and Schoharie Counties, was at the Health and Ed meeting earlier this week, to talk about budgetary issues. Cooperative Extension is another one of the services that the County supports but is not obligated to. Last budget season, they took a big hit, and that has forced some realignment of staff and services.

New York is second in agriculture in the United States (guess which NY county leads? Answer below). Otsego County has a long, proud history of farming, but there are some significant obstacles that have caused a slow erosion of historic crops. Few of us are unaware of the loss of dairy farms throughout the county, as small herds have a harder and harder time competing with large factory-like operations and the kind of transportation system that makes it possible to move milk almost anywhere. Even having Chobani nearby doesn't help; they buy milk from a wholesale supplier who aggregates the best deals every day and ships to the factory with a fleet of trucks. Economy of scale keeps the price of yogurt down, but it doesn't help the small dairy down the road.

Cooperative Extension provides educational services, among other things, to help farmers and policy-makers respond to the economic environment that agriculture lives in. In support of this role, Don handed out a county statistical profile assembled by Cooperative Extension. Being a data guy, I found it fascinating. Here, in no particular order, are some interesting results I found in this report:

• County population – 62,259 in the 2010 Census – is projected to begin declining about... now. Both the City and Town of Oneonta, however, have shown strong growth since 2000.
• Just like everywhere, the proportion of the population over 65 is growing, and is projected to grow even more quickly in the next twenty years. The median age right now is 41, and the median ages of all the towns are at or slightly above that – and the City's median age is 22. It's important to be able to factor out the college student effect from most of this data if we're going to understand it.
• 26.3% of Otsego County residents have a Bachelor's degree. The national average ranges from that to about 30%.
• Unemployment in Otsego County certainly increased in the last few years, but remains somewhat lower than the New York State average.
• We generally have more people in poverty, and few wealthy folks, than in the rest of the state, but you probably knew that already. However, median household income is substantially below the state average – about $11,000 lower.
• About 16% of children in Otsego County live below the poverty line, but this is true of one in five living in the Town of Oneonta, and one in four in the City.
• Number of farms, and land in farms, are both declining in the County, but the latter a little faster than the former.

That last piece of data suggests that we might be losing larger farms, but seeing an increase in smaller farms. It's not clear, but if it were true, I think it would be a harbinger of the future, when rising oil prices require that we find our food closer to home. The time of the 3,000 mile lettuce is ending. Our vacant farm acreage has doubled since 1970, and this positions us well when the demand for local food increases drastically.

{Answer: Suffolk County – the western 2/3 or so of Long Island – has more than $150 million in annual agricultural sales – while ranking 27th in the state for number of farms and 50th for land in farms. There might be something to learn from the agricultural entrepreneurs out there, who are doing a lot more with a lot less.}

The SAFE Act in Action

I attended the Public Safety Committee meeting this morning, as a Board member/spectator, and the Sheriff reported that activity related to firearms registration has nearly doubled since the SAFE Act went into effect. Most of the increased traffic, as I understand it, was the result of the change in handgun registration rules: instead of a single lifelong registration, now all handguns need to be registered every five years. To the Sheriff’s credit, he is not, a this time, asking for more resources to address this workload increase. He will keep the Committee up-to-date on the effects of the new law on his Department.

Most of the gun owners in the room expressed frustration and unhappiness regarding the stricter rules, and the term 'unfunded mandate' was uttered many times. There wasn't a discussion of the SAFE Act as such, and anyway, I try to retain my 'spectator' role when I'm attending a Committee meeting I haven't been assigned to, but I do have a blog, and so I can say what I think about all this right here.

No doubt, it's an inconvenience to register a handgun every five years. Registration involves a lot of paperwork, reference checks, fingerprinting, and a safety course. It's also expensive; there's a fee involved, as well. Most of the movement toward a safer society will result in some inconvenience, cost and change.

But this is the cost we must pay. We've been racking up debts for decades, buying convenience and comfort and low cost with the lives of over 30,000 Americans each year. That balance of payments has to stop. When other industrialized countries – nearly all of them – experience annual gun deaths in the two and three digit range, there is obviously something to be learned from them. The only sane path is one that moves us from 30,000 to only dozens or, at the most hundreds. That path will be expensive and disruptive to gun owners.

The Second Amendment doesn't, and never did, guarantee Americans the right to own guns without regulation. The NRA, however, has created, in the last forty or fifty years, an apparently invincible mythology regarding the sacred right of Americans to have whatever guns they want, whenever they want, so they can do whatever they want with them, with no interference from anyone. This shameful mis-education project has made it almost impossible to address the problem – 30,000 American deaths each year.

Just under 4,000 souls were taken from us on 9-11; three were killed in the terrorist attack in Boston earlier this week. Every soul is precious, so numbers don't tell the whole story. But they help us prioritize. When over 30,000 Americans are killed each year, and one private organization is keeping America from preventing this carnage – where, indeed, lies the disrespect for the Constitution and all that America stands for? And what are we willing to sacrifice to save these people?

Committee Work/Travel

As you may know, I am serving on the Human Services Committee (whose entire job is to oversee the Department of Social Service) and the Health and Education Committee (overseeing, among others, the Department of Health, Office for the Aging, and the Mental Health Clinic). I'm also the Board liaison to the Community Services Board, which oversees various mental health, substance abuse and developmental delay services throughout the county.  We got the annual statistical report from the Mental Health Clinic at the last Health & Ed meeting; let me know if you're interested in seeing it.

One of the more urgent issues before the Health and Education Committee (and, eventually, the full Board), is the senior meal program. It is one of the few large programs the County runs which is not required by State or federal law, and so is always on the chopping block come budget time. The contract with the company that provides the meals, and delivers many of them (the rest are delivered by volunteers) expires at the end of this year, and a new one is being negotiated. We've asked for a report on those negotiations at the May Health & Ed meeting, so I'll report any interesting developments then. If you know someone who benefits from the senior meal program, or feels strongly about it one way or another, the next few months would be the time to contact their Board Representative.

I'm also attending other committee meetings as well, now that I have more time, just to learn as much as I can about all areas of County functioning. I've attended all the Manor Committee meetings and Administration Committee meetings this calendar year, and I've also gotten to the Public Works Committee and the Solid Waste/Environmental Concerns Committee. This morning, I attended my first Public Safety Committee meeting.

Brian Pokorny, the IT manager for the County, kindly granted me my wish to have the chart detailing which departments report to which committees on the County website. You can find it here.

By the way – since nearly all the meetings are in Cooperstown, I'm driving a lot this year. I've decided that, as my contribution to the very tight county budget, I won't be claiming the mileage for reimbursement (although I will be claiming it as a deduction on my income taxes). I've traveled almost 1,000 miles to meetings since the beginning of the year (and car-pooled, when possible, to many more).

The 11-C Bridge

As you probably have heard, the bridge that carries County Rt. 11-C over the Susquehanna River was damaged recently by a tractor-trailer rig. The truck was almost two feet higher than the posted height of the bridge, and took out two overhead trusses before it came to a stop. There was other serious damage, as well, and the bridge will have to be replaced.

This is a beautiful spot, about three miles south of Cooperstown, where Oak Creek, flowing south from Canadarago Lake, joins the Susquehanna. The bridge was old, and overdue for replacement. For this reason, the trucking company's liability may be limited; I'm not sure whether insurance is involved, but if so, it would also be minimal. The bridge will be replaced, but it will take about a year; the county employees at the Meadows will have to go all the way up into Cooperstown and then south again to get their Big Macs for lunch. It will cost nearly one and a half million un-budgeted dollars, minus reimbursement from the trucking company or insurance, if any.

The truck, it turns out, was on its way to Brewery Ommegang – from I-88! If you're familiar with the area, you'll realize that the driver was taking the very long way around. But he was, apparently, using Mapquest, and if you're familiar with Mapquest, you'll realize that this is about par for the course. Before we moved to Oneonta, we lived on a lane-and-a-half dirt road high up on a hill overlooking the landscape north of Worcester. One day, we heard a semi laboring up the hill, taking up the whole road. They stopped at our house (the only one on the hill) for directions. Turns out Mapquest had routed them up our road: it was, after all, the most direct route.

Comments

I just wandered through this blog's settings, and discovered that Comments was only open to 'registered users.'  I don't have a registration process, so there are no 'registered users.'  Maybe that's why there have been no comments.  Or maybe it's because noone has wanted to comment.

Anyway, if the urge strikes you to comment on any of the posts, it should be simple now.  If you have trouble, please let me know.

The Local Development Corporation

As you may know, the Board will be considering creating a Local Development Corporation (LDC) to assist in selling the Manor. This is only one of three options for structuring the sale. The other two are using County Law 215, and creating our own local law from scratch. A summary of the restrictions and advantages of each of the three options was available to the public during the Board meeting yesterday, and I can provide you a copy if you'd like.

Going into the process of selling the Manor (which is a result that seems inevitable), my primary consideration will be finding a buyer with a strong record of quality care. This may require that we choose a lower bidder, if the facilities run by the highest bidder do not exhibit an acceptable level of care.

Given this, I certainly can't see us using County Law 215, since this law requires that we simply sell to the highest responsible bidder ('responsible' meaning 'able to pay'). That works if we're selling surplus land or trucks, but not in the case of the Manor.

That leaves the LDC, and the option of writing our own law. There are concerns – mostly technical – about each of the options, but both would allow us to judge the bidders on criteria other than the price they are willing to pay (although there is some uncertainly regarding how specific we can be in a local law).

The LDC is controversial because it will take the decision out of the hands of the County Board. If we decide to create an LDC and appoint the members of its Board, then the County Board will give the Manor to the LDC, and the LDC – now a private corporation – will sell it. The County Board will have no input into the LDC after it hands over the Manor.

The LDC is a creature of convenience: it's pretty clear that a private corporation will find it much easier to process the sale of a complex municipal entity than the County legislature would. Fun fact: the LDC was invented in order to facilitate the sale of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the 1960s. It's now an industrial park. An LDC owns the former Griffiss Air Force base in Rome, NY, and is developing an extensive business and technology park. And it's my understanding that an LDC was and is involved in the Bresee's sale and redevelopment.

Creating a local law, on the other hand, would keep the process – and the responsibility – in the hands of the County Board, but would also subject the process to much greater legal restrictions, and to the uncertainties of the political process (and the possible change in personnel after the fall's elections). It would certainly take longer. Many County Board members are leaning away from the local law and toward the LDC: in fact, absent some serious obstacle, I would predict that the LDC option will be chosen.

However, I am not convinced, for two reasons. First of all, I have said repeatedly – as many, or most, of my colleagues have – that my primary concern in resolving the fiscal crisis surrounding the Manor would be that quality of care continued. There are many issues and circumstances that I, and the Board, will not be able to control, but there are many others that we will be able to address – unless we give away the Manor, and with it, the process and responsibility for its sale. Right now, I'm not willing to do that.

Secondly, I understand that a municipal sale, through a local law, submits the process to the uncertainties involved in political life, and to the complexity and delay resulting from moving the process from Committee to the full Board and maybe back again. But isn't this how democracy works? It's a little messy, and it takes longer than we'd like. But when all the people are represented, and all the stakeholders have input at each step of the process, we get a result that we all can own. When Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others...” that's what he was talking about. And I agree.

Oneonta Information Meeting

The third and last of the Information Meetings on the Manor will be held at the Oneonta High School (right here in District 11!) this coming Saturday, April 6, at 1:30 PM.  We'll be meeting in the Large Group Instruction (LGI) room in the Science Wing.  Judging by the other two meetings, it should last between an hour and an hour and a half.

Remember that this is an information meeting, not a public hearing.  There will be a presentation on the current status of the Manor and the work of finding a solution to the fiscal crisis surrounding it, and then there will be a time for written questions.

I hope to see you there.  Please let me know if you have any questions about this event. 

The Union and the Manor

As you may know, the CSEA and the Board have been disagreeing on the history of attempts to communicate about the Manor. Today John Imperato, the president of the Otsego County Unit of the CSEA, read a letter to the Board (actually he only had three minutes, so he only read most of the letter) regarding the union's position on this communication history. I have a copy of the whole thing, if you're interested in reading it.

I don't pretend to know nearly enough about the details of this history to weigh in with a comprehensive position on the issue. Much of what I do know is privileged and confidential, having been discussed in executive session. But substantive talks with the union were part of the Kosmer Plan, and central to any result for the Manor that did not include selling it to a private corporation, and so this is an important issue.

I do know that the possibility of a real plan to restructure the contract into something that the taxpayers of Otsego County can afford was too complex, and too fraught with peril for both sides, to ever have been achieved from the beginning. I naively thought that we could all sit down together and talk about what is needed to keep the Manor in County hands – a result that was in the best interests of all parties.

Apparently not. Apparently, you can't just sit down and have informal talks to move toward achieving a common goal. Apparently, every conversation along those lines is consdered a negotiation, and there are rules and consequences which make creative problem-solving just about impossible.

This is a tremendous disappointment. If you put the Board in a room with the residents and staff of the Manor, you'd probably have a room full of people with very similar goals and aspirations for the future of the Manor. But the kind of conversation that could come out of this convergence of interests will probably never happen – and, apparently, never could.

Extended Voting

OK – a few posts from today's (April 3) Board meeting. I'll start with the only non-Manor topic.

Today the Board approved a resolution opposing a bill, currently making its way through the NYS legislature, which would establish early voting options in New York State. I was the only 'nay' vote.

You can look up the details, but the nickel version is that the bill would provide the option for voters to vote up to two weeks before the official 'election day.' Most states do early voting of some sort. In the last election, New York had the third lowest voter turnout of all the states, measured by the proportion of registered voters who actually cast a ballot.

Opponents of this bill contend that it would cost an enormous number of taxpayer dollars to implement, and they are right. Holding an election is an expensive proposition, whether it be primary, special or general. Many opponents also feel strongly that changing the absentee ballot laws to allow anyone to vote absentee for any reason (right now, you have to have a good reason) would achieve the same thing for a small fraction of the cost. Again, I agree, although if we abandon this bill, I believe that the chances of our seeing an absentee ballot bill anytime soon are slim. We've all observed the “Well, we tried it and noone wanted it” approach before.

However, that's not the point. For as long as Americans have had the vote, many of us have struggled to extend that vote to everyone. It was a struggle because there were other Americans struggling to restrict it. The Constitution's original limitation on voting rights to a small minority; the Jim Crow laws; womens' suffrage; current voter suppression efforts in states like Ohio and Florida – it has been in someone's interests to deny the right to vote to someone else from the very beginning.

Does extended voting increase voter turnout? It turns out that it's hard to say – factors from who's running for what to the weather on election day make every vote in every municipality unique, and very difficult to compare. However, we do know that extended voting extends the right to vote to those who have been most disenfranchised in the past.

Sure it's cheaper to resist the change. But if this is true, then we've been saving money for years by restricting access to the poor and disadvantaged. It's time to pay the true cost of a free election in a state that claims to offer universal suffrage.