MONTICELLO, NY — Judging by the experts invited to address them, the members of the Sullivan County Charter Review Commission seem especially interested in exploring the differences between the form of government Sullivan County has—an elected legislature with an appointed county manager—and the form some other counties have, which is an elected legislature and an elected county executive.

The expert who spoke at the commission’s meeting on March 25 at the government center in Monticello was Dr. Gerald Benjamin, who has a trunk full of government experience and accolades, and who also led Ulster County to its current form of elected executive government.

Benjamin said that among the most important reasons for the change was that the county administrator, which Ulster had at the time, “did not have authority to make some of the decisions he wanted to make… We were feeling lack of authority at the top of the government.”

He also said that without an elected head of government, “We felt we had insufficient voice with the state government. There was no person to whom the state government could turn who was in fact the manifestation of the authority of the county.”

He said one of the arguments in favor of an elected executive is that the person has a mandate. “A person running for office says, ‘I’m going to do these five or six things two or four years later,’ and the person either does them or not.”

Also, he said, electing a county-wide chief executive requires a political coalition. He said it “requires lots of diverse interests of the county to converge behind one person, so the more diverse the interests are, the more you want that coalition to be a dynamic dimension of governance; the more homogenous you are, the less important that is.”

He said the benefit of a county manager, such as in Sullivan County currently, is that “you get a trained professional. A manager does not need a coalition; a manager needs a majority of the legislature.” However, he said, “The risk of the county executive is that you get somebody who is popular but incompetent. Even a rather incompetent person can hire competent people and hide their incompetence for a long time.”

As for the cost of the two forms of government, he said, “People say it’s [an elected executive] more expensive because there is a duplication of staffing, and to some degree that’s true. But you have to balance that against the fact that the government will be more efficiently managed. I could never prove, from the data available in New York State, that the elected executive systems were more efficient, or delivered more for the money, but I could prove that they weren’t less efficient, and you were getting other things, like you were getting a relationship with the governor.”

There is at least some chance that this commission will recommend to the Sullivan County Legislature that the county should adopt an elected county executive. That is what the last charter review commission did 10 years ago, but the legislature opted not to follow the commission’s advice.

A commission member noted that there is an election coming up this November, and all nine legislators’ seats are up, although it appears that only eight will be seeking office again. Benjamin said it was his experience that if there were several new legislators voted into office, they would not be likely to want to accept the work of commissioners appointed by their predecessors.

Oversight versus micromanaging

Legislator Cora Edwards brought up the fact that the legislature over time has passed resolutions handing authority from the legislature to the county manager, and this has been an ongoing point of tension among the legislators. On the one hand, there are legislators like Kathy LaBuda who argue—as she did at a recent meeting—that the commissioners or department heads are professionals who will be in their positions after the legislators are gone and should not be micromanaged.

Edwards said there is a tension and a struggle over the issue. She said “People like to use the term ‘micromanaging’ when it actually means that there has been a lack of oversight.” She added, “Are we a quasi, de facto county executive form of government or are we a legislative form of government?”