COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: City-suburb divide suits Collins fine
So, Chris Collins will have the Erie County comptroller to kick around some more.
The good news is that in Mark Poloncarz, the county still has a comptroller who will kick back.
If you believe in checks and balances, the other good news is that the county executive didn’t win all of the Legislature seats he had his eyes on, even though Republicans doubled their representation from three to six seats in the 15-member chamber.
Being a “Heads I win, tails you lose” kind of guy, Collins will ignore the defeats to spin this split decision into a mandate to keep trying to run roughshod over the other two branches of government and putting to rest the fiction that he’s not a “politician.”
But the real loser Tuesday was not any one candidate or the other, but the notion that this is one region.
Collins has made it his business to drive a stake through that idea. The corporate whiz couldn’t figure out how to run a regional parks system cost-effectively, so he dumped the Olmsted parks back onto the city’s books even though the parks draw users from far and wide.
His bid to take the county out of services that help poor people—no doubt spurred by the notion that most of the poor live in the city—will get a boost if it turns out he has more soulless mates on the Legislature.
And the overarching GOP strategy of not running credible candidates in Buffalo— Chairman James Domagalski couldn’t find a mayoral contender because the Brown administration is doing such a great job?—cements the city-suburban divide.
The Collins-led GOP, in a masterly bit of political redlining, will play to voters on one side of the municipal line while ignoring those on the other.
It’s a cynical strategy, but one that apparently works. There’s little other explanation for the convincing victory of Sheriff Tim Howard, except the theory that suburbanites believe they’ll never experience the frightening conditions at the county lockups he oversees—to use that word loosely.
Calling Howard the Dick Jauron of law enforcement would be an insult to the football coach. Whatever his other failings, the Buffalo Bills leader doesn’t dodge the responsibility that comes with the title by blaming others for his organization’s failures.
Howard had a stellar career as a state trooper, but that doesn’t make him a manager.
But who cares what happens in the jails when the stereotypical face of the criminal remains that of the urban street thug?
The Collins strategy of stonewalling federal and state jail inspectors is just part of the continuing pattern. The countyexecutive— who was trounced in Buffalo but got elected by winning big outside the city—is playing to his notion of suburban sensibilities and concerns over taxes. It ignores the fact that Western New York cannot prosper without a thriving Buffalo, a reality that regionalism advocates pushed hard before the concept fell by the wayside.
“A central part of [regionalism] was learning how to share resources,” said Henry L. Taylor Jr., director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies.
But don’t expect much of that unless the new legislators fool us—and fool the county executive—the way some Supreme Court justices fool the presidents who nominate them.
Collins and his growing GOP contingent promise to bring a “business” approach to government, and the fear is that they’ll be true to their word.
After all, we know how corporations treat central cities.
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