On Election Day voters have the ability to grade the performance of current county treasurer David Farrell. If they have paid attention to his past performance, especially in the last several years, they will give him a failing grade. They need to not only cast a ballot against Mr. Farrell, but be willing to vote for his opponent, James Orman. That decision should be easy.

Clearly, the biggest issue over the last several years has been the underbilling of $655,000 to 31 towns and villages that were part of a health insurance consortium over three different years. If you are a taxpayer in Auburn, Owasco or several other towns and a village, you should be upset because you may have to pay for insurance costs of other municipalities as well as your own.

If you are a taxpayer in one of the 31 municipalities, you may not have paid at this point, but you may - with interest. At the very least, the failure by the treasurer to bill correctly has devoted time, energy and resources to this issue that your communities could have productively devoted elsewhere.

Listening to David Farrell explain the health insurance fiasco at several recent forums, a listener may come to one of two conclusions. He is bamboozling everyone with his answers on what happened and what went wrong or he doesn't have the ability to explain, in simple language, what occurred.

The health insurance fiasco should be reason enough to not re-elect David Farrell.

One of Mr. Farrell's newest arguments for another four-year term is that he, as a Democrat, would be the only person standing as a watchdog against the Republican controlled Legislature. That argument might hold water if he pointed out problems with their work, and held their feet to the fire on financial issues regularly. The problem is that with one notable exception, he doesn't seem to have done so.

He and his supporters talk about an estimate that he made during last fall's budget process on health insurance rates, which the Ways and Means Committee decided to disregard. While that may be true, it again raises the issues of his billing failure over three years. One might wonder if this one instance of waiving a red flag was more to do with his past actions and re-election strategy than future planning.

Mr. Orman has pledged to ask the state comptroller to do a top to bottom audit of the treasurer's office. With all the questions that have been raised about bidding practices, health insurance and tax agreements, that is not a bad idea. He has also discussed making the office more accessible and user friendly. He also seems to have a better grasp on the technological needs of a 21st century government than his opponent, who admits this deficiency.

The bottom line is Farrell needs to move on and the county does as well, but not together. James Orman is the far superior choice for voters on Tuesday.

Cosentino is a former mayor of Auburn and can be e-mailed at cozguytho@aol.com