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 36^th 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.