EDITORIAL: Mayor Miller Shows There Can Be A Better Way

1-15-10

It’s nice to get some reassurance from our Otsego County neighbor to the south – the City of Oneonta – that streamlining, benchmarking, professionalizing, planning, then implementing are part and parcel of good governance.
For newly elected Oneonta Mayor Richard P. Miller, Jr., made it clear he plans to govern that way during a five-hour retreat he convened Saturday, Jan. 9, to agree on ground rules and priorities with his Common Council.
In short, communities can chart successful futures.  Oneonta can; thus, so can Cooperstown.

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First, Miller – former president of a national high-end printing concern based in Rochester, past SUNY vice chancellor and comptroller, and Hartwick College’s retired president – advised the alderpeople the city was operating under a “structural deficit.”
To wit, City Hall had taken $1 million a year out of reserves to balance the 2007, 2008 and 2009 budgets.  Three more years, he said, and the cupboard will be bare.
He ticked off the revenue options:  Raising property and/or sales taxes (the second is not an option for a village), “modest” PILOTS (“payments in lieu of taxes” from non-profits), consolidation and economic development.
And the cost options:  Efficiencies, staff – “head count” – and/or service reductions, or ending City Hall’s financial commitment to a recreation center in the old armory or to the under-used city airport.
A “structural deficit” is exactly what the Cooperstown village board discovered last May, and options Miller proposes for Oneonta are the same options available here.
Most intriguing among Miller’s options is revisiting PILOTS with its non-profits – the hospitals and colleges (SUNY and Hartwick), but with many other entities as well.
The non-profits don’t have to ante up, the new mayor said, but he expressed the belief that they would if it could be shown how the in-lieu payments would benefit them directly.
It’s hard to believe that Cooperstown’s non-profits wouldn’t be equally agreeable if a reasonable case was made to them as well.

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Mayor Miller unveiled other specifics that would be likewise helpful in Cooperstown governance.
One is the concept of the “consent agenda” – making one motion, one second and one vote on routine, non-controversial items that, voted on one by one, are time-consuming to a fault.
Miller reviewed the last Common Council agenda and found 24 separate votes routine enough to be handled in one swoop.  (For instance, “Motion that Common Council increases the hourly rate for Daniel Baker, laborer, to $8.75 hourly, effective Jan. 1, 2010.”)
How much time can be saved?  Ten minutes?  Fifteen?  Village trustee meetings are routinely running past midnight; every little bit would certainly help.

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Another specific:  Miller reduced Common Council’s 10 committees to four,  finance/administration, human resources, facilities/operations/technology, and the Community Improvement Committee (formerly intergovernmental affairs.)
The village has 24 committees.  ‘Nuff said.
Oneonta’s new mayor also was able to put every councilperson (but one) on his or her first and second committees of choice.  The one exception got one preferred committee.
In recent years in Cooperstown, it has appeared that favored trustees – previously, Paul Kuhn; lately, Lynne Mebust – are overloaded with too many committees.  Less-favored trustees end up with few and marginal assignments.
Miller also assigned a different city professional to each committee, to prepare minutes and ensure decisions are tasked.
The goal of this streamlining is to free up alderpeople (read, trustees) from day-to-day minutiae, to chart where the municipality should be going.  (Miller’s Priority One, fiscal, but there’s much more.)

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The new mayor also expressed concern that city employees may be underpaid.  City Hall will be checking with like-sized municipalities to make sure Oneonta is on a par – or better – than its peers.
The Village of Cooperstown would benefit hugely from this kind of benchmarking, of wages, of benefits, of productivity – you name it.
Most exciting, Mayor Miller has already opened conversations with the Town of Oneonta on merging the two municipalities. 
A greater Cooperstown – the village, plus the towns of Otsego, Middlefield and Hartwick – would be a powerhouse, expanding the tax base, saving tens of thousands annually on duplicated services, and creating a municipality with enough space for prudent, environmentally sensitive, but muscular expansion of the tax base.
As St. John put it, “If ye know these things, happy are ye who do them.” 

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The approach to governance in fiscally strained Cooperstown is particularly relevant now, with villages elections coming up March 16.
Voters should question candidates for mayor and for two trustee vacancies on these very issues, and vote for the ones who pledge to seek out, understand and embrace good governance.
The candidates who address them most satisfactorily should be elected.