Merge and meld?

Merge and meld?

Voters may seem to have squashed any thoughts of government
consolidation last November, but cold, hard budget facts may force the issue
back into public debate.

            Consolidation
on a service level came up last week, for instance, at a City Council hearing
on Mayor Bill Johnson’s budget proposal. Patricia Malgieri, CEO of the Center
for Governmental Research, said area governments need to look for more ways to
consolidate services. “You need to be open to every consolidation or
outsourcing opportunity,” she said.

            “Consolidation
can be at many different levels,” Malgieri said in an interview later: the city
and towns, towns and villages. Malgieri points to services such as building
inspection that the city is providing to neighboring Brighton.

            “The city
is on the cutting edge with the Town of Brighton,”
said Malgieri. “Are there other towns that might be ready to do that now with
the city?”

            Malgieri
suggests that city firefighters could supplement services in the suburbs —
which Rochester is doing now, on a
limited basis, in Brighton. And, she said, with a new
county executive and a new countyWater
Authority head, this may be a good time to reconsider consolidation of the city
and county water systems.

            “In this
economic era, all governments are feeling fiscal strain,” said Malgieri. “I
think we need to be open to every option.”

            Johnson,
whose county-executive campaign was based in part on the need to study
consolidation, agrees. The city has contract obligations for a specific level
of staffing, he said, which could limit its ability to extend services into the
suburbs. But, he said in an interview last week, “there may be some
opportunities, and I would certainly be anxious to pursue it with adjacent
towns.”

            “I think
there is an even greater opportunity,” he said, “for the county to create a
county-wide fire department, particularly given the shortages faced by
volunteer fire departments.”

            Johnson
said he has discussed that issue with the Rump Group, an organization of
business leaders that has urged a study of service consolidation. “Some
volunteer fire departments just don’t have enough staffing to get to the fires
on time,” said Johnson. “The Rochester
fire department may be ideally situated to be the central core of a county-wide
fire system.”

            In her
statement at the City Council budget hearing last week, Malgieri also raised
the issue of police-service consolidation. Currently, the city and some towns
have their own police departments, while other towns rely on the countywide
Sheriff’s Road Patrol. All county taxpayers finance the Road Patrol, whether or
not they pay for a local police department.

            A county-wide
police system, which voters rejected in the early 1980’s, would be hard,
Johnson said, because city and town residents have a strong emotional
attachment to their own police forces. “But we’re in an era now when you have
towns and villages with budget problems, and police budgets are the highest
cost centers,” said Johnson. “There may be opportunity now.”

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About those schools

MonroeCounty
has 18 different school districts, with their own superintendents,
administrative staffs, food services, transportation systems, and maintenance
staffs. But talk of consolidating school districts or school-district services
brings a loud public outcry.

            In MonroeCounty, at least.

            In many
other parts of the nation, countywide school districts are the norm. And
school-district officials and community representatives in Broome and TiogaCounties are studying the
possibility of having their 15 school districts share services.

            They’ve
hired Rochester’s Center for
Governmental Research to study the issue: “everything from joint bus
contracting, joint purchasing across school districts, purchasing of health
insurance, maintenance of school buildings,” says CGR’s president and CEO,
Patricia Malgieri.

            “Anything
that every school district has to do can at least be investigated,” she says.
And, says Malgieri, “one of the options that we will be looking at is having
them all consolidate into one school district.”

            Malgieri
says CGR will have a draft report of the Broome-Tioga study by the end of the
year.

            And, she
adds, community representatives in another county have inquired about a similar
study.

            The
requests, says Malgieri, are highly unusual. “People identify very closely with
their school districts. We credit the Broome-Tioga area greatly with having the
courage and foresight to say, ‘We at least need to look at it and see whether
there’s any viable opportunity here.’ It’s very rare.”

            Might there
be such a discussion in MonroeCounty?
“I don’t see it happening anytime in the near future,” says Malgieri.

Midtown housing?

At City Council’s hearing on the city budget last week,
Center for Governmental Research CEO Patricia Malgieri offered several
suggestions for revitalizing the city. Among them: the city might consider
acquiring MidtownPlaza
by eminent domain and having it converted into housing.

            “Residential
housing has been one of downtown Rochester’s
shining stars in recent years,” she said in an interview later. Despite
numerous proposals for reuse, Midtown continues to be vastly underutilized. “If
nothing materializes soon,” said Malgieri, “the city should look into securing
that site by eminent domain.”

            Midtown,
she said, “is a key piece of property that would allow for large-scale
residential development.”

            But Mayor
Bill Johnson calls a city take-over “a pie-in-the-sky idea.”

            “You have
to weigh the consequences and the cost,” he says. “Under eminent domain, you
have to pay fair market value for the property. That is a burden that this city
can’t assume. We have projects like street repairs, building repairs, equipment
purchases, fire trucks, that we have delayed because we don’t have the money in
our capital budget.”

            And even if
the city came up with the money to acquire Midtown, he says, it would have to
pay millions of dollars to demolish the building — and then hope that a
private developer would buy it.

            “We have to
rely on the expertise of the private sector,” says Johnson. And, he says,
private developers are already building housing downtown. “They look at the
market” and determine what’s feasible, says Johnson, “and they don’t ask for
any public financing.”

This article appears in Jun 9-15, 2004.