COMMENTARY
Donn Esmonde: Insider tells town boards’ dirty secret
To hear some of these town board members tell it, they are as essential to our existence as bathroom towels and a winter coat.
As the movement to cut the size of town boards marched on, panicked board members tried to scare the populace into believing that they are as necessary as sunlight.
The ground will tremble if West Senecans shave their board to three members. A plague of locusts will descend if Orchard Parkians dare to erase two board seats. Corruption will ensue if Aldenites try to make do with three members.
Enough already.
I heard recently from Joe Weiss. Weiss has, for the last five years, sat on Clarence’s Town Board. He has an insider’s view. Even better, he does not owe anything to anybody. Weiss is 62, an entrepreneur with a stake in a handful of multimillion-dollar companies. He does not need a patronage job. He is not beholden to any political machine. Which means he can speak the truth.
And the truth, as he sees it, is that the people who recently voted to downsize town boards in West Seneca, Evans, Orchard Park and Alden are right. We do not need so many politicians.
“There is not that much for a board member to do; there really isn’t,” Weiss told me. “Eighty percent of what we do is theater. Our department heads do a great job of running the town. Clarence is not unique; we mirror the other town boards It’s a tremendous waste of money to have all of these members.”
I expect board members in the county’s 41 towns and villages to tape Weiss’ picture to their rec room dartboards. The rest of us ought to shake his hand for having the guts to pull back the curtain.
“No one from a political party ever approached me with a good idea for the town,” Weiss noted. “They function solely to put on fundraisers and to get ‘our guy’ into office. There is no discussion of goals or objectives. It’s all about picnic menus, [political] sign distribution and literature drops. . . . Votes are made on the basis of whether it is good for [them] politically or socially.”
For all of their claims of service, I have yet to see a town board member plow a road, dig a sewer, haul garbage or fix a streetlight. As far as policy goes, Weiss said that with planning or zoning questions, board members routinely defer to experts with advanced degrees who work for the town.
Board members in downsizing-targeted towns—Hamburg is next, in November— complain that they are the victims of misplaced voter anger. I think there is some truth to that. But board members in town after town—by putting change on a slow boat and treating the public like a plaything—play a major role in their own demise.
I cannot count the times I have seen board members in one town or another carry on endlessly about nothing— while regular folks wait hours for a few minutes of airtime. An inflated sense of self-importance seems to come with the job. You would think they were working in the halls of Congress, not in the town hall.
Weiss gets backup from another insider. Deborah Yeomans served on the Orchard Park Town Board a few years ago. “I never felt like [other board members] were listening to people’s concerns, it was more like ‘We know best,’ ” Yeomans, a psychotherapist, told me on the night last month when voters downsized the board. “It was hard for me to deal with that attitude. I felt like government was an obstruction rather than a service.”
To Weiss, it all comes back to the same thing.
“There are not a lot of game-changers on these boards,” he said. “It’s the status-quo people.”
Only now, there are fewer of them.
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