— — Have you ever found yourself agreeing with both sides of a contradictory argument? I did this week when reading News reporter David J. Hill’s account of the brewing fight between regionalism advocate Kevin Gaughan and the Kenmore Village Improvement Society.

Gaughan is on a crusade to reduce the layers of government in Western New York. He’s absolutely correct when he points to the absurd number of elected officials that serve a community that’s consistently declining in population. Government is expensive, and decreasing the amount of it will eventually lead to a decrease in taxes.

First on his list are villages. Western New York has several of them. He calls them vestiges of colonial America — completely antiquated considering villages exist within townships that provide the same services at a lower cost.

Enter the Kenmore Village Improvement Society, a group of diehard Kenmore residents who would like nothing more than to run Gaughan out of town. Their point is simple: Yes, taxes are higher in Kenmore, but residents like paying them because they get better services in return.

The village is a small place, and a government all their own is much more attentive and responsive. A village police force can answer calls faster than the Town of Tonawanda police might, because the town is much larger than the village to patrol. The snow plows come around more frequently for the same reason. Ditto for garbage collectors. Village board members have fewer constituents and can address individual problems neighbor-to-neighbor.

If the good people of Kenmore are willing to pay more in taxes to get more in services, who is Kevin Gaughan to say they’re wrong?

But if someone doesn’t do something about the cost of government in Western New York as a whole, how will any of the problems we’re having ever be solved?

Gaughan operates on a theory — that there’s a silent majority in places like Kenmore made up of people who could care less about all those wonderful services if it meant cutting taxes. That’s why he’s pushing to have a petition signed by at least one-tenth of village residents, to put dissolution of the village to a vote.

But there’s a hiccup in Gaughan’s logic, at least politically. It would stand to reason that a silent majority is much harder to get to the polls than the loud minority that opposes dissolution.

Of the 10,000 or so village residents, only a few hundred regularly vote in village elections. That is for many reasons, not the least of which is — for reasons unknown to me — village elections frequently aren’t held at the same time as other, larger elections. You won’t see a candidate for village board on the same ballot as those running for president of the United States, traditionally the election where the most number of citizens turn out to vote. The fact is, most village residents don’t know when elections are held, much less anything about who’s running in them.

Local newspapers such as this one try to put together what information they can, but in a race that’s as small as one for a village trusteeship, frequently there isn’t much to write about. Candidates usually differ very little in their views, if they’re opposed at all.

So if hardly anyone votes and even fewer people vote intelligently, is this really a system of government that represents vox populi?

Depending on where you stand, the whole thing is either quaint or utter nonsense.

Far be it from me to tell the good people of Kenmore, many of whom I’ve come to know in my years at the helm of this paper, what to do. I don’t live in the village so it’s not for me to decide.

If the people are happy — or at least not unhappy enough to demand change — perhaps the efforts of a regionalism advocate like Kevin Gaughan might be better off focused on the municipalities where people aren’t satisfied with how their local municipality operates.

I can promise, there are a whole bunch of people in North Tonawanda who pay a lot in taxes themselves, and they aren’t getting the same bang for their buck as those in Kenmore.

If you want to talk about consolidating government and making it run more efficiently, why pick a fight with the people who seem to be the most satisfied?

Eric DuVall is the managing editor of the Tonawanda News. His column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Contact him at eric.duvall@tonawanda-news.com.