Village life: Worth the price?

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Paul Lane

July 15, 2010

By Paul Lane CNHI The Tonawanda News Thu Jul 15, 2010, 06:00 AM EDT

NORTH TONAWANDA — I live in neither Sloan nor Williamsville, but if I did you couldn’t keep me away from the voting booth Aug. 17 with a stack of hundred dollar bills.

Residents of those Erie County villages will vote that day to determine whether the village governments will dissolve. The next phase that’s been pushed by activist Kevin Gaughan’s downsizing initiative (the first was to reduce the size of numerous town boards), the votes are meant to reduce taxpayer burden by reducing the number of people on the payroll.

I can’t applaud loudly enough. I love the fact that some of our municipalities (maybe) realize that we don’t need so much government. And while eliminating village property taxes would still keep town taxes (which might go up slightly due to a shifting of duties), school district taxes and county taxes, anything to cut costs helps.

Nothing against the workers in these governments, of course, but their current pain would be worth it to ensure the long-term sustainability of these places. Government should exist to help people in ways other than a steady paycheck and lifelong benefits, and the only way to bring about any sort of change to our fractured system is to lengthen the unemployment lines in the short term.

To be fair, I have never lived in a village, so I don’t know from personal experience whether the extra layer of services is worth the cost. If you ask the good people of Kenmore or Lewiston, they might just say they want things to stay how they are.

But would the world cease to rotate if Kenmore or Lewiston voters eliminated their villages? Hardly. Everyone would get used to the new way of things, leaving talk of “the good old days” of extra government for old-timers gathering for an early-morning talk at the local coffee shop.

In a lot of ways, most people wouldn’t miss — or necessarily even notice — villages as institutions.

If village residents vote to keep their governments, then so be it. That’s the whole point of our system of government, to allow affected citizens to voice their opinions.

The key is that Sloan and Williamsville voters, for starters, will get that chance. If it were up to me, I would mandate on a state level that every village hold a vote this year on dissolution (I would do the same thing with some towns/cities — we don’t really need a City and Town of Tonawanda, despite the fears that some lovers of fiefdoms have of losing an identity — and school districts).

Since it’s not, I will have to take small satisfaction in the fact that, in some places, consolidation just might take place. Hopefully the holdovers will eventually catch on that what they’re clinging to might not be worth the strain.

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