Cuomo: Local governments are antiquated, inefficient

During his campaign, Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo’s transition team released a detailed and well-annotated report outlining plans for “Rightsizing Government.”

The report’s findings and recommendations reiterate much of what the previous columns in this series have suggested: that New York state’s Public Authorities and agencies have “become too big, too expensive, and too ineffective — an ever proliferating tangle of boards, commissions, councils, departments, divisions, offices, task forces and public authorities, [that] the taxpaying public can no longer afford.“

Amen.

The report also calls for “right-sizing” New York’s antiquated system of overlapping and inefficient local government services provided by 62 counties, 932 towns, 555 villages and more than 7,000 special districts. I have not expressed this concern in my prior columns. I believe it is a valid consideration. I’d like to know if you agree.

To restructure and "right-size" this current tangle, Cuomo will recommend the establishment of a Spending and Government Efficiency Commission — the SAGE Commission — to conduct a comprehensive review of every aspect of state government. To ensure that its recommendations are implemented, the report also calls for the immediate passage of a “State Government Reorganization Act” that will give the governor the authority to eliminate, transfer and consolidate state agencies without further legislative approval.

A brief assessment: We hardly need another commission, doing another review of findings that are already a matter of record and imminent concern.

The title of this report is also a bit disingenuous. Real reform is dependent on a rightsizing process that puts fundamentally sound business practices that are absolutely needed and hardly debatable into play. Reading from a report entitled “Lesson’s from America’s Public Sector Innovators,” published by the Reason Foundation, many states are currently implementing key strategies that will encourage competition in the delivery of public services, and mandate, among other things, the use of Performance-Based Budgeting practices and Activity-Based-Costing routines. None of this is addressed in Cuomo’s “Rightsizing Government” report.

In a recent New York Times editorial, “Mr. Cuomo’s Job,” its board noted that eight books full of campaign promises have been published, including the report reviewed in this column. With a goal of restoring New York to its “days of glory” our governor-elect will obviously need a reasonable amount of support from 62 senators and 151 members of the Assembly — many of whom are still wearing “Streamline Albany’s Rambling Bureaucracy” campaign buttons. A budget is due by Feb. 1 for legislative approval by April 1.

Let the games begin.

This is the seventh installment in a series of columns on the topic of reforming New York’s dysfunctional state government. You can read these columns at www.liherald.com/opinions/op -ed. Comments can also be shared on Peterson’s Word Press blog, halreformnys.

Peterson is a resident of Rockville

Centre. He retired as Director-Internal Audit NYNEX Corporate, and serves as a business advisor to a number of information technology companies.