A lot of people who don’t live in a village are having a hard time trying to understand what happened in Sloan and Williamsville last week.

Voters there had a rare opportunity to get rid of an entire layer of government, saving some money in the bargain, and—despite the rampant fear that they would be abandoned and left for dead by the towns of Cheektowaga and Amherst, respectively—seeing no real change in the services they are provided.

But as we know now, the voters reacted to the idea of government dissolution as if they had been asked whether they would like to have cayenne pepper rubbed in their eyes.

The results were not a surprise. When a poll showed 75 percent of Williamsville voters opposed dissolution, no one, least of all dissolution leader Kevin Gaughan, thought the proposal had a prayer. No similar data was available for Sloan, but neither was anyone rising up to say it was a good idea. Near the end, the best supporters could hope for in Sloan was a close vote, and they didn’t even get that.

So what happened?

• Williamsville was the wrong place to pick a fight. No one is marching around complaining about life in Williamsville. It is a thriving, affluent, almost beloved community. If you want people to get behind your plan to get rid of their government, it would make more sense if they were first unhappy with that government. Sloan is not the same kind of place, but officials there wisely piggybacked on the Williamsville effort, making many of the same arguments and even holding their vote the same day.

• Gaughan believed the public embrace of town board downsizing last year was a sign that people were ready for substantial change. They’re not. If you have three people instead of five sitting on a dais in your town hall every other Monday, nothing changes in your life. But take away your village? That’s who you are. At least that’s the argument dissolution opponents made. And it worked.

• The dissolution effort was being led by—depending on whom you asked—a failed politician, a busybody, an outsider, a know-it-all and an arrogant so-and-so. By the time the polls opened, it was less about village government and more about Gaughan. He would have been wise to retreat into the shadows and defer the leadership role to actual village residents who could be the face of the cause.

• You know the cliche about Washington: People hate Congress but love their congressman. Around here, people say they hate paying taxes, but they don’t mind paying more taxes to keep what they have. I lost track of the number of people who said they don’t mind paying higher taxes to live in a village. The same thinking applies to school merger proposals. Voters will scream and yell about school taxes, but give them a chance to save money by merging with another district, and suddenly they don’t mind so much.

• There was no overcoming the problem that no one knew what would come next if the villages were dissolved. Gaughan could have proved conclusively that living in a village causes kidney stones, but without any guarantee that dissolving the village would keep them away, he simply could not win.

That’s what happened. What happens next? The tiny Village of Farnham is next on Gaughan’s list, with Sept. 28 set as D(for dissolution) Day.

Farnham has 300 people. It’s precisely the kind of place that seems like it could function just fine without a village government.

A lot of people thought the same thing about Sloan and Williamsville. They don’t get to vote in Farnham, either.

bandriatch@buffnews.comnull