Here & There Column 6-14-11

Spending Has To Be Consolidated

Many times headlines on columns or stories are very misleading as was the case recently when the penning of a column read, "Don't Make Liberty Police a scapegoat for village woes."
No one in their right mind would ever want to make any police department a scapegoat for what ever the real problem is. All municipalities are doing here is reaching out for possible solutions and the Village of Liberty has done nothing wrong in exploring the approach they made.
Most police agencies do what they have to do and most do it with efficiency and professionalism.
Getting down to the real issue and shoving all the political smokescreens and BS aside the Village of Liberty and many other villages both in and outside this county are facing financial "woes" that they have never had to deal with or have been attempting to ignore for many years.
Municipalities everywhere have just too much overlapping of services and we are seeing more and more consolidations taking place..... the truth of this whole issue is that spending by all government has to be consolidated.
In conversation the other day at Florida, NY a town councilman remarked to me that in the three seconds is takes to read a newspaper sentence, the federal government will have borrowed $175,000 and every passing second results in another $58,000.
A statement like this simply ties in the total fact that all government's addiction to spending is literally choking the life from us taxpayers and will no longer be tolerated by the voting public.
The Village of Liberty had no choice but to try and cut down spending which with the cooperation of the police department union was accomplished and jobs were saved and taxpayers were protected from a huge tax increase.
NYS Governor Andrew Cuomo has issued incentives for municipal consolidations and it very well may push the Village and Town of Liberty to take this step.......actually if the village made the decision to dissolve all the services would become the responsibility of the town and suggestions about the village police department being taken over by the town would be mute and a special town police district for what formerly was the village would have to be established.
There has just been too much political BS thrown into this entire issue.
As we reiterate once again, government has to learn to live within their means and reduction of services and consolidations must be made.
Our village and town governments have difficult budget problems with funding police work and a possible solution here would be the incorporation of these departments into our countywide police department--the Sullivan County Sheriff's Dept.