Vote

I've gotten to most (not all - sorry) of you, knocking on doors and doing democracy on your front porches. Again, thanks so much to all who were so gracious and hospitable, and really, without exception, that includes everyone who answered their door when I knocked. Thanks!

Now it's time to do your part. Those of you who know me understand my passion for democracy. Voting creates democracy, and we have to re-create it every year, every month, every day, every time we have an opportunity to speak up and make a choice about how our life in the community is going to go. If we don't do that, democracy goes away. I think you know what that looks like.

So come out and vote on Tuesday, November 3. Foothills atrium, from 6 AM through 9 PM. You can find fifteen minutes during that time to do something powerful and good and patriotic.

See you at the polls.

Planning

I've always thought of this blog as your first step in having an impact on County functioning. Knowledge is power, and if I can bring you some information that you think is important enough to act on – perhaps even through the blog to me – then that is a great thing. Here's another way to have a similar kind of impact.

There's a set of countywide public workshops coming up, whose purpose is to solicit public input into our strategic planning process. That sounds a little bureaucratic, but really, we're trying to look a little into the future, and see what's needed and what will be needed, and how we can steer the ship the right way, in order to get there.

If you're familiar with this process, you may be a little cynical about it, drawing on some experience you might have had when a strategic plan was drawn up with much fanfare and then put up on a high shelf and forgotten. I personally think that we need a comprehensive plan, a bigger look at a longer future (perhaps more on this distinction in a future post) but I do know this much: it certainly won't work if the people of Otsego County don't come out and participate. So come check it out.

H&E Gone to the Dogs (and Cats)

You may have read in the AllOtsego Weekly Update that one of the week's three “Top Stories” was that the County's Health and Education Committee, which I serve on, decided that “Animal Shelter Won't Get $100,000.”

That sounds a little harsh, of course – how could we not resist helping all those cute pets? Heck, the 16 year old cat currently on my lap came from the shelter as a kitten.

The truth is, that the Susquehanna Animal Shelter – which has no connection with the SPCA or the ASPCA, and receives no support from them – came to the H&E Committee, out of the blue, at exactly the worst time possible. The Board and all its committees are making extensive efforts to find every stray dollar to cut, in order to end up with a balanced budget in December. So – adding something new to the budget for next year is just not on the table, anywhere.

I happen to believe that the Shelter provides an important service to nearly all County residents: finding good homes for stray animals; managing the stray population in the county; preventing overpopulation and the eventual increase in strays that overpopulation would create. The Shelter has a hands-on Board and (probably) underpaid staff members who keep things going on a shoestring. It's a service that I think the citizens of Otsego County might be asked to share the cost of, by providing them an allocation in future years.

So, as a member of the H&E Committee, I couldn't help right now (although we all encouraged them to come back next summer, at the beginning of budget time), but as a citizen of Otsego County, I could: I sent them a donation as soon as I got home. I recommend that everyone consider doing the same.

"Crisis"

Also in the “Star” you'll see the term “financial budgetary crisis,” describing the fiscal state of the County right now, as we work on the 2016 budget. This seems a bit dramatic, although I suppose it depends on your definition of 'crisis.' I need to be a bit closer to impending doom before I use the term, but that's what was in the resolution instituting the “hiring freeze” today (see previous post).

It is true that we're a long way from a balanced budget, a destination we have to arrive at, and approve, before the end of the year. There are a lot of difficult fiscal issues that have converged on Otsego County this year, and it's harder than it has been for a while. But it is not impossible to overcome these problems.

The reimbursement issues affecting the Department of Social Services, which I help oversee as chair of the Human Services Committee, have been trumpeted continually as the source of our troubles by some Board members. We are projecting over two million dollars less in revenues than we have in the past, and this is, surely, a problem. But it's important for us to understand that it's a problem that originates completely in Albany, not Cooperstown. Given this, Treasure Dan Crowell is arranging meetings that will, it is hoped, move us closer to getting the NYS Comptroller, Tom DiNapoli, involved in some reforms that would allow us to receive reimbursements we have earned in a timely and predictable manner. You've heard about this before.

I'm a little put out by the fact that DSS is taking the public brunt of the “crisis.” I've responded strongly in a few meetings, and as a result, the problem is articulated as “Albany DSS.” Just once, I'd like to hear the tower project (which, in another retraction – sorry – actually is costing around $8 million) referenced as a part of the problem. We're in the hole about as much for this project as we are due to the DSS reimbursement issue. We've kicked the can down the road some by borrowing enough money to cover the cost of getting the towers done next year. From what I can tell, it will cost us just under a million a year for the next decade, or nearly. A lot of this – probably most – is because we missed a grant we could have had, and we missed it because we did not ask our grant-writing consultant to write the grant. Why? Lots of eye-rolling and averted gazes.

Don't buy the story that some folks are selling – that DSS is the department that has caused the “crisis.” It's propaganda, and it's not true.

Re-Freeze

You will probably see an article in tomorrow's “Daily Star” about a county-wide “hiring freeze.” In fact, if you routinely get the “Breaking News!” e-mails from the “Star,” you've already seen it.

The truth is, there has been a “hiring freeze” in place since 2008. It's easy to get around, and we've gotten around it now for seven years. The current “freeze,” emerging from Donny Lindberg's Budget Committee, essentially adds the Administration Committee, and the full Board in some cases, to the current process for filling vacancies. Currently, the parent committees need to approve filling any vacant position, and some of them need to go to the full Board. From now on, this process will require the approval of the Administration Committee and the full Board as well (Corrections is excluded, as we are required by law to maintain a certain staffing level in the jail).

So Otsego County has not stopped filling vacancies; it's just made the process of filling vacancies harder and longer, and given more people a chance to scrutinize each request. And there's no sunset clause, so this will no doubt be the process for some time.

More Dead. More Words.

It seems that words haven't stopped the killing:

It hardly seems worth the energy to once again make the same essential point that the President has now made again: we know how to fix this. Gun control ends gun violence as surely an antibiotics end bacterial infections, as surely as vaccines end childhood measles—not perfectly and in every case, but overwhelmingly and everywhere that it’s been taken seriously and tried at length. These lives can be saved. Kids continue to die en masse because one political party won’t allow that to change, and the party won’t allow it to change because of the irrational and often paranoid fixations that make the massacre of students and children an acceptable cost of fetishizing guns.

The 2^nd Amendment was never meant to guarantee individuals the right to own guns. At its worst, it was meant to assure the slaveholding South that they could maintain their State militias, seen as essential in preventing slave revolts, in ways that the new American standing army might not, and at best as an assurance that militias all over the country would be “well-regulated.”

It wasn't until 2008, in the Heller case, that one vote on the Supreme Court created a majority in favor of the individual's right to own guns. And even that decision acknowledged the need for regulation of that right.

Read your history, NRA members, and then come back and tell us that these massacres are necessary to uphold some spurious right that the Founders never intended.