Officials can’t afford to play Santa Claus
Jim Gulli has an expression he has referred to a few times during his tenure on the Troy City Council that may in a lot of ways sum up what’s been wrong with city government for the past quarter-century and left the city and its residents in a fiscal sinkhole.
Gulli likes to use the phrase “measure twice, cut once” whenever his fellow council members want to rush too quickly resolve a problem. This carpenter’s creed sends a very specific and important warning that without proper planning, any task is unlikely to be completed correctly.
While that may seem to simply be common sense — especially to anyone who has done any building of their own — it is advice that isn’t always followed in the world of politics. The flameout of the first effort by President Trump and the Republican Party in their first effort to “repeal and replace” Obamacare is a prime example. Despite the GOP stating its unequivocal opposition to the Democratic healthcare plan that has been the law of the land for more than five years, its leaders never came up with an alternative until they took control of the White House and both houses of Congress. Now that they are in power in Washington, their first effort was scuttled because they couldn’t even agree within their own party on an alternative.
Gulli is trying to avoid a similar pitfall for his idea to revive the annual Powers Park summer concert series after its funding was cut from the 2017 city budget. The legal pad he had with him as we sat down Thursday morning at the Lansingburgh Cafe to talk about his plan was filled with scribbled ideas, the names of musical acts that could fill the eightweek schedule of Saturday night shows in July and August and those interested in supporting his idea of soliciting 26 local businesses to put up $500 apiece as sponsors of the series.
The result, he hopes, is to raise the $13,000 estimated cost of the series without having to rely on the city to scrape together money it had already cut from the budget to reduce an impossible tax increase of more than 28 percent to simply an impractical, 14.5 percent hike. The beauty of his plan, though, is that it not only keeps the city’s hands from dipping further into taxpayers’ pockets, but, maybe more importantly, it essentially puts it in the pub- lic’s hands to determine if the concerts are worth saving. Business owners with limited resources don’t have the same luxury as governments to demand its “customers” pay more so it can do more; those that do usually end up out of business.
When it comes to our tax dollars, however, that isn’t always the case. Take for example the ongoing campaign to reopen the two municipal swimming pools also cut from the city budget, which may be the first big issue of the upcoming City Council campaign season. Mayor Patrick Madden’s administration is advocating a measured approach, looking to bring in professional engineers to
examine the facilities in Lansingburgh’s Knickerbocker Park and in South Troy and determine not only how much it would cost to bring both up to condition to allow for safe swimming, but also if it would be a worthwhile investment, given structural concerns with each.
On the other side of the aisle, council President Carmella Mantello seems to be practicing the “ready, fire, aim” method of governing, calling in a news release for the city to dip into its $1.2 million capital reserve fund and a $600,000 contingency fund built into the budget for unexpected expenses to pay for repairs, as well as cover the $130,000 cost of staffing the two, even without knowing the extent of repairs needed. As I assessed it when word first got out that a group had started an online petition to keep the pools open, the squeaky wheel was getting the grease, especially with the entire council up for re- election in November to fill what will be two fewer seats as a result of changes to the city charter made last year.
Quieting those squeaky wheels has been a top priority for most politicians because it’s easy to grab voters by painting your opponent as the bad guy taking away what the people want and you as the hero riding in to save the day. That tactic used to work quite well, too, when government pretty much had a limitless supply of money. Now, though, while you may appeal to the handful of people who want what they want, you’re just as likely to upset those who would rather not see their hardearned money thrown down what certainly seems to have gone from swimming pools to money pits.
On the other hand, Gulli is letting the people decide what they consider “essential” by calling on them to put their money where their mouths are if they want the concerts back for a 14th season. Simply put, if the support is there, the concerts will resume. To me, at least, that seems much more democratic (with a small “d”) than having 559 people (the number of people to sign the petition as of Monday afternoon) get their way just because they were the loudest to protest — of course, there’s also the fact that while I haven’t checked each individual “signature,” a significant number of them come from people who
don’t even live or pay taxes in the city.
Instead of the career politician continuing to rob Peter to pay Paul — the same attitude that has helped get the city into the financial fix it is trying to extract itself from — Gulli is acting like the career businessman he is, measuring carefully to ensure the job is done right the first time and is what the taxpayer wants their money spent on. Politicians have been campaigning for decades now on the premise of running government like a business, and that seems to be especially true as taxes have to climber astronomically higher each year just to maintain the services we came to expect in the past.
Officials at all levels of government — but especially at the municipal level — can’t afford to be Santa Claus anymore, especially for what most would agree are non- essential services like recreation programs. They have to be frugal, they have to ensure they’re getting the biggest possible bang for the few bucks they have to spend, and — in what is probably the toughest thing a politician can do — they have to learn how to say “no.”