For more than a year, Cayuga County Manger Wayne Allen has been trying to push his idea of a multi-million capital plan through the normally reluctant Cayuga County Legislature, without success.
As a body, it has traditionally had a policy of benign neglect: leave it alone and it may work out, wait long enough and it will become someone else's problem, or repairs and improvements can be done on the cheap.
That isn't an unusual policy - governments across the board try to put off what they don't want to address immediately. A good example was the city of Auburn in the 1980s with its triple problems of landfill, sewer and water upgrades. In the end it took costly consent orders from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to require them to do the right thing. Nationally, governments have done the same with roads, bridges and other infrastructure needs for decades.
In all the above instances, few would doubt the need of local governments to address these needs, yet, when it comes to pulling the budgetary trigger, few are willing to saddle taxpayers with the cost of such changes. In many instances local officials try to either wait out the problem or hope someone else will come to their aid - often Albany or Washington.
So how do you deal with the competing need to keep taxpayer's happy and take care of critical infrastructure needs?
One might want to look at what Auburn did in the early 1990s when it created its capital improvement program dedicating a line on tax bills to pay for upgrades and the accompanying debt service. Initially set at $1 per $1,000 of accessed value - it gave taxpayers a way to see how much such work really cost.
This process required the city's staff to put an annualized capital improvement program before the city council to approve every year. It didn't mean that city staff would automatically do each of the items planned - they would still need to come back to the council to approve individual projects.
The best news for many of the elected - after an initial need to educate the public on what the funds were for - for the most part questions on the program went to the staff to explain, when they came up.
In the end, creating a dedicated capital improvement program might be a way for the county Legislature to address issues in a more timely fashion, so they don't become more costly over time, as have the upgrades to the 911 System and renovations for the Mental Health Office.
Cosentino is a former mayor of Auburn and can be contacted at cozguytho@aol.com
That isn't an unusual policy - governments across the board try to put off what they don't want to address immediately. A good example was the city of Auburn in the 1980s with its triple problems of landfill, sewer and water upgrades. In the end it took costly consent orders from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to require them to do the right thing. Nationally, governments have done the same with roads, bridges and other infrastructure needs for decades.
In all the above instances, few would doubt the need of local governments to address these needs, yet, when it comes to pulling the budgetary trigger, few are willing to saddle taxpayers with the cost of such changes. In many instances local officials try to either wait out the problem or hope someone else will come to their aid - often Albany or Washington.
So how do you deal with the competing need to keep taxpayer's happy and take care of critical infrastructure needs?
One might want to look at what Auburn did in the early 1990s when it created its capital improvement program dedicating a line on tax bills to pay for upgrades and the accompanying debt service. Initially set at $1 per $1,000 of accessed value - it gave taxpayers a way to see how much such work really cost.
This process required the city's staff to put an annualized capital improvement program before the city council to approve every year. It didn't mean that city staff would automatically do each of the items planned - they would still need to come back to the council to approve individual projects.
The best news for many of the elected - after an initial need to educate the public on what the funds were for - for the most part questions on the program went to the staff to explain, when they came up.
In the end, creating a dedicated capital improvement program might be a way for the county Legislature to address issues in a more timely fashion, so they don't become more costly over time, as have the upgrades to the 911 System and renovations for the Mental Health Office.
Cosentino is a former mayor of Auburn and can be contacted at cozguytho@aol.com
