Remember - blog posts migrate downward, so the most recent post is at the top; the oldest at the bottom.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

The County Administrator Issue

I'm a data guy, mostly because arguments based solely on opinion or emotion quickly run out of logical steam. Objective data is going to be the same, no matter what you think of it. Analysis of objective data is my kind of a good time.

Those of us County Reps of the Democratic persuasion have been talking about the idea of some kind of administrator (usually referred to as a County Manager, or County Executive, or County Administrator) as a direction in which Otsego County should be going. There are arguments for and against, and I'll be writing more about these as the debate takes shape. This needs to be a long and careful process, one which I'm ready for, but it's too complex to address in a singe post. More to come.

However, this month the NY Association of Counties, an active and useful organization, produced its Directory, with thumbnail sketches of each of the 57 counties (58 if you count NYC). I took certain pieces of data – county population, county administrator, legislative type – and put it in a simple database. Interesting stuff.

Unsurprisingly, the most populous counties all had county administrators. You need to go down to the 36th most populous county – Columbia County – to find the first one without an administrator.

County Population Executive Legislators Legislature
Columbia 63,094
23 Board of Supervisors
Otsego 62,259
14 Board of Reps.
Washington 61,042 County Admin. 17 Board of Supervisors
Genesee 60,370 County Manager 9 County Legislature
Fulton 55,531
20 Board of Supervisors
Chenango 51,401
23 Board of Supervisors
Franklin 51,134 County Manager 7 County Legislature
Tioga 51,125
9 County Legislature
Montgomery 50,219 County Executive 9 Board of Legislators
Allageny 49,927 County Admin. 15 Board of Legislators
Cortland 49336 County Admin. 17 County Legislature
Greene 49,221 County Admin. 14 County Legislature
Delaware 47,980
19 Board of Supervisors
Wyoming 43,424
16 Board of Supervisors
Orleans 42,883 County Admin. 7 County Legislature
Essex 38,851 County Manager 18 Board of Supervisors
Seneca 35,251 County Manager 14 Board of Supervisors
Schoharie 31,582
15 Board of Supervisors
Lewis 27,087 County Manager 10 Legislative Board
Yates 24,621 County Admin. 14 County Legislature
Schuyler 19,343 County Admin. 9 County Legislature
Hamilton 4,836
9 Board of Supervisors

Otsego county, with about 800 fewer citizens, was #37. Of all the twenty counties with a smaller population than Otsego County, thirteen of them have administrators of some type. Of the 57 counties, then, only nine – including Otsego County – have no county administrator.

Of those nine, seven are run by a Board of Supervisors (a type of county government where the Town Supervisors are, collectively, the county legislature). Is there something about a Board of Supervisors that is antithetical to a county administrator in smaller counties? I don't know.
So that leaves Otsego County as the second largest county in New York State without a county administrator, and one of two (with Tioga County) with a separately elected county legislature, and no county administrator.

As I said, more to come. I think there's evidence in this data that we ought to think and talk about this idea a lot more than we have.


Another Summit

I've just returned from the Mohawk Valley Economic Development Summit in the delightful Arkell Museum, right on the Erie Canal in Canajoharie, NY.  New York State is divided into ten economic development regions, each of which submits a consolidated application for each annual round of state economic development grants. Otsego County is the southern outlier in the Mohawk Valley region, which also includes Oneida, Montgomery, Fulton, Schoharie and Herkimer Counties.

There was a lot to learn today, and I'd be glad to go into more detail with anyone who's interested. Just some random highlights:
  • The Mohawk River connects two of the hottest economic engines in the Northeast – the Marcy Nanocenter at SUNY-IT, just north of Utica, and the Global Foundries installation in Malta, NY, just north of Albany. These are monster installations that do, or will, manufacture a significant proportion of the digital brains that are running more and more of the stuff in our lives. The Malta plant has a 'clean room' the size of six football fields, and has an impact on tens of thousand of jobs in the region. Dozens of local high schools and colleges – especially community colleges – are adding new courses and programs specifically to train local folks for careers in these and related industries.
  • There's a lot of movement in the agriculture sector, in all of upstate New York, but this is not your grandfather's agriculture. The hungriest market in the country is only three hours south of us, and the demand for buzzword food groups – local foods, artesial foods, BGH-free, reasonably antibiotic-free, non-GMO foods, free-range (the list is very long) – increases every day. This shouldn't have surprised me, given all the vacant farmland in Otsego County, but it did: upstate farmers can produce many times what they produce now if they can only be assured of a market for it. So the challenge here is not producing the right kind of food, but creating and maintaining the sustainable economic connections needed to assure farmers reasonable market consistency. So: food hubs, food cooperatives (which should be a no-brainer for Oneonta), central processing operations, refrigeration and storage centers on the way to the great appetite, etc.
  • Each county had ten minutes at the beginning of today's meeting to 'introduce itself,' and the representatives of five of them, mostly CEOs of prominent businesses, did a great job of presenting a balanced and comprehensive view of the resources and challenges in all segments of their county's economy. Otsego County's representative, however, did not. Jeff Idelson, President Baseball Hall of Fame up in Cooperstown, spent about eight of his ten minutes selling the crowd on the Hall of Fame, as if there weren't anything else worth talking about in Otsego County. What a great opportunity wasted.
Probably about 100 people showed up this morning, the men and most of the women in suits, dressed for networking, and much of the day was self-congratulation and cheerleading. There's lots to be encouraged about, and lots of talk along the lines of “this is not the same old encouraging chatter we've heard for fifty years of decline; this is different,” but there are signs – local, national and international – that this benighted region may be in the way of some significant opportunities. More to come, surely.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

At the FERC Public Hearing

I just returned from the FERC hearing on the Constitution Pipeline, which was held right here in District 11, in the auditorium of the High School. It was a nice walk up and back; it wasn't so pleasant inside.

You probably know that I'm concerned about pipelines, and specifically this one, for a number of reasons. They're more dangerous than proponents want you to believe. They create new ecological niches and realities that we can't really predict, contrary to the assurances of the proponents. They create jobs, certainly, but out-of-area contract jobs, and when their distinctive boom-bust cycle is over, the infrastructure created to serve the workforce is abandoned, and all the associated jobs disappear. They carry, in this region, anyway, fracked natural gas, and can accommodate much more if fracking is approved in New York State. They lead us further and further down the hydrocarbon road, and further away from sustainable, renewable energy sources. And for some reason, this private sector project whose only goal is to create profit has access to the eminent domain process, where they can essentially steal land from private citizens, paying only pennies on the dollar.

As I walked through the parking lot, I noticed the out-of-state plates and the buses (and one tractor trailer with a union sign on it), suggesting that there was a lot of organized attention being paid here. Inside, the auditorium was full. Many signs were in evidence, and lots of guys (almost exclusively males) had orange shirts proclaiming their love for the pipeline.

OK. Lots of people with lots of thoughts and opinions. Emotions were high. This was democracy in action. Each side cheered for their speakers. The loudest response, while I was there, was to a woman who claimed that the anti-pipeline environmentalists were the 1%, the ultra-rich who want to turn the Catskills into a wealthy person's playground. Given that the money – lots of it – is flowing exactly in the opposite direction, the clamorous cheering for this point exposed some embarrassing ignorance. Still – OK. Thomas Jefferson said that this kind of thing would happen, and championed democracy anyway.

What led me to leave long before the end was the rudeness. The poor bureaucrats on stage had little control over the shouting back and forth, namecalling and unpleasant comments which peppered the evening. When I left, one of the speakers had whipped both sides into a deafening frenzy, and I hoped that the two OPD officers stationed on stage were able to restore order.

We can disagree, but if we can't be civil, we've given up civilization. And then what are we fighting for?