My View

Revising the county charter

The Charter Review Commission is a temporary organization that is impaneled every 10 years to review the county charter and suggest possible changes to the original legislation that are then voted on by county residents in a binding referendum.

At the Fremont Town Board meeting in December, a spontaneous coalition of local citizens, town board members and county legislator Rodney Gaebel drafted me to serve on the Sullivan County Charter Review Commission to insure that there would be realistic and conservative representation from western Sullivan County and the river towns on that body. My candidacy was unanimously approved by the county legislature on December 27, with one member absent.

Ironically, more than a decade ago, I testified before the old Sullivan County Board of Supervisors against the adoption of the charter and the proposed establishment of a county legislature to take the place of the Board of Supervisors. At that time, I argued this was change for the sake of change, which would create another unnecessary layer of government and make the county decision-making process more remote for the average citizen.

Many town supervisors now agree with me. In fact, there is a county supervisors association headed by Lumberland Supervisor John LiGreci that currently meets regularly in an attempt to collectively bring issues before the Sullivan County Legislature. But this is only an informal lobbying group without real input into the county legislative process. The town supervisors have belatedly discovered they no longer have the direct impact on county affairs they had under the old system.

At a recent town board meeting, Fremont supervisor James Greier discussed an idea that might resolve this problem that I will bring to the table before the Charter Review Commission. He and others are suggesting that we create a bicameral or two-house legislature based on the federal model. One would be the county legislature, which would function as the local equivalent of the United States Senate. The town supervisors would also meet at the government center as the local equivalent of the House of Representatives. All county legislation would then have to receive a majority vote in each body to be approved. A weighted voting system would be used by the town supervisors to meet the one man, one-vote requirements currently required by the United States Supreme Court. We might then have a synthesis that retains the best elements of both the old and the new forms of county government.

Another issue that will come before the Charter Review Commission is the question of whether we should have an elected, rather than an appointed, county executive. Although I feel that the firing of Dan Briggs last year was an unfortunate miscarriage of justice, I support the retention of an appointed county executive. Once you give the county executive independent elective status, it is inevitable that you will weaken the county legislative system, essentially turning it into a superfluous institution that will be nothing more than a rubber stamp for a strong executive with authoritarian tendencies.

Another issue needing attention is potential gerrymandering, that is, the drawing of distorted electoral districts containing distributions of voters favoring one party. The county charter contains an elaborate listing of the election districts that collectively compose all nine of our current legislative districts. We need to add a clause guaranteeing that county legislative districts will not be gerrymandered to give a built-in advantage to one political party or another, and that these districts will all be compact in size and politically competitive.

Finally, everyone knows that private property rights are under attack all over this country since the unfortunate Kelo v. New London United States Supreme Court decision, which gives government entities at all levels the right to condemn private property for any reason at all. To prevent such abuses here, I propose that a clause be added to the county charter saying that eminent domain (condemnation) can only be exercised for extreme tax delinquencies, emergency situations or health reasons. All other county acquisitions of property should be on a willing buyer-willing seller basis. Similar legislation protecting local citizens from eminent domain proceedings could then also be adopted by each of our towns and villages at the local level.

Noel van Swol

Long Eddy, NY