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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.


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