The road to reform
A capacity crowd of law students, faculty, media and officeholders was on hand in the law library on Feb.19 as New York State's chief law enforcement officer introduced his sweeping plan to simplify and reform government.
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo called his presentation "The Empire State Strikes Back: A Plan to Reform New York State Government."
The nation's economic crisis is the perfect occasion to take bold steps to streamline government, the attorney general said:"New York's governments are too big, they are too many, and they are too expensive."Private companies are scrambling to reorganize, modernize and find efficiencies in their operations, he said, and the public sector should do the same. "When the numbers change, the reality changes," he said. "And government should be doing the same exercise today."
One problem, Cuomo said, is the sheer volume of local governments operating in New York State – by one count there are 10,521,including nearly 7,000 "special districts" formed to levy taxes for specific services such as fire, sanitation and lighting. That bloated bureaucracy, he said, is why New York State residents pay the highest local taxes in the country – about $73 per $1,000 of property valuation, where the national average is $43.
Cuomo is building support for a plan – not yet introduced in the State Legislature – that would enable local governments to reorganize to eliminate redundancy and waste. Consolidation, he said, could reduce property taxes from 5 to 22 percent. As an example, he said that if the village and town of Seneca Falls were to consolidate, the owner of a $100,000 house could save $978 a year in property taxes.
The major impediment, he said, is an "antiquated" set of laws that make it "virtually impossible" to accomplish such reforms. Reform, Cuomo said, would empower local governments – for example, the county executive and county legislatures – to make governments smaller. And it would make it possible for citizens, with petition signatures from 10 percent of voters, to force change onto the ballot if their elected officials balk.
And to those who say reform legislation is a pipe dream, Cuomo pointed to New York's system of school districts."In the 1930s, there were over 10,000 school districts," he said."Now there are fewer than 700.If you can tackle and manage the consolidation of school districts, you can do this."