Downsize or not? More tests planned
Residents of four towns to hold votes on boards
Residents of Alden and Orchard Park will be voting in September on whether to trim the size of their town boards, and residents of Cheektowaga and Hamburg will have their say two months later.
Civic activist Kevin P. Gaughan and a group of volunteers have been collecting signatures in Alden and Orchard Park for the last two weeks to set votes Sept. 15 to downsize the town boards from five to three members.
People in West Seneca and Evans in June voted decisively to downsize their town boards to three members. Downsizing advocates are hoping to build off those victories and trigger public votes on downsizing in all the towns in Erie County in the next two years.
“Because of our success, there’s an increased awareness and increased understanding of the need for change,” Gaughan said. “Against the backdrop of the disgrace of state government, Western New Yorkers understand that the first step toward changing all levels of government is to change local government.”
Gaughan hopes to gather enough signatures in Orchard Park and Alden to force public votes in September on trimming both town boards from five to three members. If voters approve, the changes would take effect in 2011.
The campaign is scheduled to spread next to Hamburg and Cheektowaga, in the hopes of setting public votes in November to downsize those town boards. If the measures pass, Hamburg would have three board members in 2011, and Cheektowaga would have five.
Many government officials remain skeptical about the downsizing. Hamburg Supervisor Steven J. Walters, for instance, said he supports trimming government but questions whether cutting two seats on the Town Board is the most effective approach.
In the last few years, Hamburg has slashed the number of its special districts, saving taxpayers more than $1 million a year, he said, yielding much more substantial savings than a Town Board downsizing would.
And, he added, it remains to be seen how effectively a three-member Town Board would function. Downsizing critics, along with the state’s expert on open government, say that it would be very difficult to operate a three-member board without regularly violating the state’s open-government law, which prohibits a majority of any board from discussing town business in private.
There are also other concerns regarding such a small board. Walters says Hamburg has already encountered some difficulties tied to a smaller Town Board.
The Hamburg Town Board opted not to fill a vacancy this spring, leaving a four-member board until the end of the year. The board had to cancel one meeting because one person was out of town and another had an emergency, Walters said. A second meeting nearly was canceled, but a board member attended despite being sick, to ensure a quorum.
“I would really like to see Kevin take a step back and have this downsizing in West Seneca and Evans prove that it works,” Walters said. “If it’s going to work, give people the opportunity to see that it does indeed work. If it doesn’t work, why would you want to put more towns in that category?”
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