Today's Post Standard features and Op Ed from County Executive Joanie Mahoney calling for increased consolidation of essential services throughout the county. In yesterdays post i spoke of the need to reduce the size of the legislative body and this article piggybacks on that same theme. Can we afford not to reduce government? Can we afford to continue spending our hard earned and dwindling tax dollars not on services actually being provided but on duplicated layers of bureaucracy?

There has been much talk of consolidation of police and fire services but little concrete action to date. Why the resistance? Well for one our elected officials are very entrenched and comfortable. And why shouldn't they be with incumbency an almost guarantee path to year after year reelection. Some have called for term limits but i feel this simply masks the larger issues at hand. The problem is that too few people vote and those who cast ballots with regularity fail to even research their candidates, choosing instead to vote across the party line blindly choosing any candidate so long as they are the same party as the voter. Many defer their obligation to know the people they are voting into power and leave it to the discretion's of the party elites to put forth a slate of "like minded candidates". Until we as tax payers begin to challenge our leaders: Democrats and Republicans we will be destined to elect the same stale old guard mentalities that got us into this mess.

At the end of the day we all want the politicians to cut our taxes-but they dare not cut our subsidies. The elderly want more programs for seniors but decry spending on sports of education. Younger families with children rail against more Senior offerings and demand more money be spent on education. People argue against merging police departments out of fear that they will no longer be safe though statistically that has not proven to be the case where consolidation was put into effect.

"Cut my taxes-cut someone Else's benefits" seems to be the battle cry of our once proud and powerful state" We need to get to a common ground of shared responsibility and shared sacrifice where hard choices are openly debated and votes taken. We need to get to a place where our revenues match our expenditures and our priorities are focused on "less being more" and on "the must haves-versus the nice to haves". Only then can we move forward.
http://blog.syracuse.com/opinion/2010/06/commentary_approach_discussion.html

Challenges for the Onondaga County Legislature

There is  a proposal being forwarded to reduce the number of legislators from the current 19. Each of these elected officials after just 5 years of service gets health insurance coverage for life. What is wrong with this picture? I mean i guess i can't argue with the fundamental capitalist ideal that any individual should try and get as much financially as he or she possibly can. But when this same "Greed is Good" (Gordon Gecko-Wall Street) philosophy extends to the realm of publicly financed and elected representatives i have a problem with the entire notion. Clearly elected official deserve to be compensated. But how many elected officials do we need to represent us in Central New York and at what cost. In business organizations determine relative compensation strategies through cost benefit analysis propositions. What litmus test should we apply to our elected officials?

Onondaga County is relatively small @ 459,805 residents per the 2000 census. In this same county we have over a dozen towns and villages all with elected officials. Could we not reduce the elected officialdom of our county? Could we not appoint the existing town supervisors to also serve 1 time per week in county wide legislative sessions? All the "talk" about consolidation of services and belt tightening has been just that...TALK!!! We need to take action.

Perhaps 19 legislators is too many, maybe 19 is just right...what do you think?

Check out the revamped Visit Syracuse Website

http://www.visitsyracuse.org/

Destiny USA-Boomtown to BUST!!!

So where did the vaunted Destiny Project go wrong? Was it one promise to far? Or was it a pipe dream from the very start. Clearly the entire CNY community was energized at the prospect of such a huge development coming to our hometown. Many people, politicians, businesspeople, everyday locals, all felt the sweetheart deals given to Bob Congel would end up netting little of the promise of Destiny. There is little argument that the project has been mired in legal wrangling for over 2 years with no direction and no action taken at the site. What is less clear is the future of the project as a whole. Clearly a new economic reality has taken the world by storm. The Great Recession has caused many an entreprenuer to recalibrate his or her vision for the future and Destiny is just another project in a long line of corporate excess and over reaching that has defined the last 2 years. Destiny for all its promise, its vision, it granduer is effectively dead. Caught in the halls of courtrooms both state and federal and destined to be tied up in legal brinkmanship for the foreseable future leaving an entire community to ask-if not Destiny then what, and if not now then when? You see CNY has lost its traditional manufacturing base with its good paying jobs...its young educated offspring have moved on and out of theri hometown in search of actual opportunity, not the illusion of opportunity.