The author is a public service professor at Rockefeller College at the University at Albany and has over 25 years of experience in working on and teaching about law and economic policy issues in Albany and Washington, DC.
Earlier this year I was asked by the Bethlehem Town Board to co-chair a citizens’ advisory group on governance. At our first meeting in January, I was excited, but a little daunted by the task of bringing together a dozen town residents from across the political spectrum to put together a report for the board that would give a balanced look at governance issues and options for the town to consider. We agreed on three areas of exploration and organized ourselves into subcommittees on the topics.
The first subcommittee was to consider whether Bethlehem should consider changing its method of electing board members from the current “at-large” system to a representational system, where board members would represent a particular section of the town called a ward. The second subcommittee explored alternative ways that Bethlehem could select the town clerk, receiver of taxes and highway superintendent. Finally, the third subcommittee explored the length and limit for terms of office in Bethlehem (e.g., the supervisor serves a two-year term while the members of the board served staggered four year terms).
With an optimistic initial goal to finish the report by mid-June, we were on track to do so when the fun began. The subcommittees finished their reports by early June, and I wove them together into a draft for committee review. It had always been our intention to issue a full committee report for the board and the public that reflected, as much as possible, the views of the entire committee and not just individual subcommittees.
Over the next few weeks, I received comments from all committee members as well as Town Supervisor John Clarkson and Deputy Supervisor John Smolinsky, who had been supporting our efforts from the outset. Mr. Clarkson, who is widely acknowledged to be an expert on local government affairs, gave me many suggestions for clarifying language, some of which I incorporated into the report. After much editing, the report was finally ready to be submitted on July 5 with a fuller presentation to the board and public about the substance of the report later in July.
Much of what happened after the report was formally submitted in early July has been covered extensively in The Spotlight and elsewhere (e.g., an independent submission by some members of the ward subcommittee; a contentious initial board meeting, etc.), so I won’t rehash it here.
What I do want to discuss is the sense of disappointment on my part and on the part of most of the committee. We devoted our best efforts to produce a balanced report that we hoped would assist the town in thinking about its future. While not all of the ideas discussed in the report are, in my judgment, ones that merit further consideration (e.g., I think Bethlehem is too small for a ward system), we were glad to have had the chance to explore and learn about them. For some members of the Board and others in the community to have used this report as a “political football” to advance agendas having nothing to do with its substance is really “small town politics” at its worst. Our committee felt used and demeaned. The recent victory of Bill Reinhardt in the Democratic primary and the success of the Bethlehem Reform Democrats in getting many seats on the Democratic Town Committee are reflective of the disdain that many of us have for “politics as usual” and reflect a constructive desire to change things for the better.
I also want to take The Spotlight to task a bit for its coverage of our report. While the paper does need to report on the “horse race” nature of politics to sell papers, I think that it did a disservice to its readers by not looking beyond the politics and encouraging a dialogue about the policy implications of the various ideas in the report. While I concede that some of the issues raised in our report were also discussed in prior citizen panels such as Bethlehem 2020, we felt that the issues we raised were worthy of a serious discussion and not deserving of the dismissal in the Spotlight editorial.
I hope the next time that a group of citizens volunteers its time and talents to help Bethlehem become a better place, both elected officials and the local newspaper value the contributions more than they did those of my committee.