Regionalism revisited: the effort to streamline governance in Buffalo and Erie County, New York.

• Author: Bucki, Craig R.

1. INTRODUCTION

   During the first half of the twentieth century, burgeoning grain transshipment trade and heavy manufacturing spurred the bustling economy of Buffalo, the eastern-most port on the shores of Lake Erie and the second-largest city in the State of New York. (1) With the jobs that these industries provided came residents to occupy them. In the 1900 census, Buffalo ranked as the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of over 350,000. (2) By 1950, Buffalo could claim over 580,000 residents--the most ever in its 118-year history to that time. (3) Buffalo had become overwhelmingly dominant among the many municipalities in the County of Erie.

   However, the 1959 opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which encouraged large oceangoing vessels to bypass Buffalo via Ontario's Welland Canal, severely damaged Buffalo's grain trade in the decades that followed. (4) Meanwhile, numerous manufacturing concerns, most notably Bethlehem Steel in 1982, transferred their operations to southern states and foreign countries in search of lower taxes, less stringent environmental regulations, and a workforce that demanded lower wages. These changes have sapped the City of Buffalo of much of the industrial core that drove its economy through the 1950s. Just as residents arrived with the advent of new jobs, they have left in the wake of those jobs' departure. Although approximately 950,000 people still call Erie County home, (5) the United States Census Bureau estimated Buffalo's population, as of July 2004, at just 282,864--a decline of nearly 10,000 from the Bureau's official count in 2000. (6)

   Recognizing this precipitous drop in population and the exodus of industry, a handful of politicians and community leaders in the mid-1990s publicly recommended merging the City of Buffalo into Erie County as an elixir. (7) Such a merger would enable Buffalo to claim the residents of surrounding towns, and thereby vault ahead in the rankings of America's most populous cities. Perhaps more important, proponents of the merger sought to assign successful suburban communities responsibility for returning Erie County's urban center of Buffalo to its former prominence. (8)

   The parlance of Buffalonians has termed this effort to transform the governmental structure of Buffalo and Erie County as "regionalism." Support for regionalism gathered steam with the 1999 election of Republican County Executive Joel Giambra, a staunch advocate of consolidation to promote, in the words of a campaign slogan, "better, smarter and cheaper" service delivery. (9) By 2004, having earned re-election with nearly fifty-five percent of the vote against a regionalism opponent in solidly Democratic Erie County, (10) Giambra charged a commission of citizens, led by former State University of New York at Buffalo President William Greiner, to devise a plan for city-county merger that he could present to the voters in a referendum that he optimistically scheduled for November 2005. (11) Soon thereafter, however, the winds of political change suddenly shifted course. Although the commission released a plan of merger in January 2005, it abruptly suspended its work indefinitely later that month, in the wake of a multimillion dollar county budget deficit that voters blamed on the previously popular County Executive. (12) With nearly 80% of Erie County residents believing that Giambra should resign as County Executive, (13) and with Giambra's "favorable[]" poll rating in the single digits, (14) the regionalism effort that seemed plausible to succeed in 2004 has now stalled, as citizens continue to leave the City of Buffalo for suburban Erie County and beyond.

   As a new Erie County Executive takes office on January 1, 2008, this Paper seeks to examine the etiology of this current state of inertia, and to consider those provisions of New York law which may offer an electorally palatable alternative to formal consolidation of municipalities, which may nonetheless spur renewed investment to grow the property tax base in the City of Buffalo. To provide a framework for analysis, Part II of this Article summarizes academic literature that divides the substance of regionalism into "old" and "new" varieties. Questioning "old" regionalism's promotion of inter-municipal consolidation to revive struggling urban centers, "new" regionalism has expressed skepticism concerning the political will among suburbanites for such wholesale change. As a response, new regionalists have emphasized cooperation among towns and cities within the existing structure of municipal governance.

   In addition to identifying two substantive kinds of regional change, Part II also distinguishes "old" and "new" procedures for their implementation. Whereas the "old" method presumes that business leaders and elected officials must devise proposals for government consolidation, the "new" procedural regionalism anticipates that such proposals will originate among the general populace. A prominent, recent example of regional planning in Utah has demonstrated collaboration among community stakeholders, heeding the preferences of the citizenry at large, and has proven successful as a procedure for implementing new regionalism's substantive goals. (15)

   Upon tracing the origins of the movement for regionalism in Buffalo to the present day, Part III demonstrates the inability of "old" procedural regionalism to convince Erie County residents to change the structure of their local governance. Since the mid-1990s, "regionalism" has meant old-style consolidation, rather than new-style intergovernmental cooperation. Plans to merge the City of Buffalo into Erie County resulted not from reflective debate among a broad range of community leaders, but rather from promotion by a small group of influential power-brokers, including County Executive Giambra and the publishers of the Buffalo News, Erie County's most widely circulated daily newspaper. Although this derivation won backers for consolidation at the height of Giambra's popularity, it also rendered regionalism vulnerable upon the revelation of Erie County's budget crisis in 2004. As soon as voters no longer supported County Executive Giambra, regional reforms inseparably associated with his tenure correspondingly lost public confidence. As this Paper posits, had genuine input from numerous stakeholders and ordinary citizens generated proposals for regionalism, they could have survived in spite of Erie County's fiscal troubles and Giambra's sudden fall from grace.

   Informed by this lesson, Part IV presents a partial plan for "new" regionalism in Buffalo and Erie County. First, from a procedural standpoint, Erie County's municipalities can form an "intergovernmental relations council," pursuant to New York's General Municipal Law. Consisting of interested businessmen, developers, unions, community leaders, and other stakeholders, the council would gather input from citizens concerning their preferred vision for regionalism. Based upon their comments, the council would devise a regional plan that could win broad acceptance among Erie County residents. Second, to rebuild within its current boundaries, the City of Buffalo should pursue the substantive tool of tax-increment financing--also afforded by the General Municipal Law--which can permit reconstruction on blighted and vacant properties by interested developers. Pursuant to a redevelopment plan for targeted neighborhoods, the City could issue municipal bonds to fund property enhancements that would rehabilitate the urban tax base. The excess taxes collected as a result of these improvements would subsequently subsidize repayment on the bonds' principal and interest.

2. REGIONALISM: SUBSTANTIVE AND PROCEDURAL, OLD AND NEW

   In the United States of America, the concept of regionalism arose from the post-World War II growth of suburbia, newly populated with young veterans and their families who desired new houses away from the cramped conditions offered by inner cities. Suburban development caused cities to become "surrounded by increasing numbers of municipal governments" that steadily claimed the residential property-tax base that the cities had once predominantly enjoyed. 16 For example, in Erie County, new construction of single-family homes in the 1950s and 1960s in "first-ring" communities such as Tonawanda, Amherst, Cheektowaga, West Seneca, and Hamburg lured thousands of middle-class residents away from the duplexes of Buffalo's ethnic neighborhoods. (17) Consequently, Buffalo and other industrial cities suddenly faced a challenge to maintain their municipal services despite the exodus of property-tax revenue to suburban communities. (18) In response, despite well-known opposition, (19) some commentators have proposed to rehabilitate urban property tax rolls by consolidating cities and their suburbs into general-purpose, metropolitan governments. Most notably, David Rusk, a former mayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and syndicated columnist Neal Peirce have argued for such a drastic alteration in the landscape of local governments. (20)

   1. "Old" Substantive Regionalism: Annexation and Consolidation

      Rusk seeks to create "elastic cities," with "the political and legal tools to annex new land." (21) In many states, "annexation ... generally requires the consent of local residents." (22) For example, the New York "Bill of rights for local governments" provides:

      No local government or any part of the territory thereof shall be annexed to another until the people, if any, of the territory proposed to be annexed shall have consented thereto by majority vote on a referendum and until the governing board of each local government, the area of which is affected, shall have consented thereto upon the basis of a determination that the annexation is in the overall public interest. (23) Although this constitutional guarantee protects local governments from unwanted intrusion by their neighbors, it also prevents...