Whitesboro: To Be or Not to Be? That Is The Question.

And it is coming before the voters on Tuesday, January 4th!

Something not discussed, but which may be helpful in deciding how to vote, is to consider the difference between a Town and a Village. It can be expressed mathematically by the following formula:

Town/Village = "The Elite"/"The People"
Or in words: A Town is to a Village as The Elite are to The People.

Towns (and Counties) are imposed "top down" by a government elite who draw lines on a map for the purpose of ensuring a "Government" presence within the bounded area.

Villages (and Cities), on the other hand, grow from the "bottom up,"  willingly incorporated by people, usually within a limited geographic area, who share some common interest to achieve a common purpose.

While "consolidation" of government to eliminate duplicative layers has an intuitive appeal, consolidation of a village into a town means that people who incorporated for a common purpose will be governed by a larger group that may not share that purpose -- or who may actually be adverse to it.

A problem with New York's style of governance is that jurisdictions are "nested" with the larger (elite drawn) jurisdictions often having the power to duplicate services provided by the smaller (people drawn) jurisdictions within... and still charge the people in the smaller jurisdictions. This means that the people in the smaller jurisdiction not only pay for their own services, they pay to duplicate the same service beyond their boundaries.  This creates a financial incentive for the smaller (people drawn) jurisdiction to dissolve into the larger (elite drawn) one. The larger (elite drawn) jurisdiction, however, does not tie together people with a common interest . . . And That is The Problem.

On this site I have often advocated for the merger of all Greater Utica jurisdictions into a new municipality.  To be viable, such a municipality must arise from the Will of the People, based on a realization that our shared interests (common water and sewer systems, a common market and labor pool, etc.) exceed our separate ones. It must not be imposed from above by the elites (like the Water Authority which was never voted upon by the People.)

Before pulling that lever (or is it filling in a bubble?) on Tuesday, people in Whitesboro need to think: are they voting for governance by an Elite? or by the People? 

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