By Jason Emerson
The final report is in, and the results make it unlikely that the village and town of Cazenovia will move forward with any sort of consolidation, according to members of the consolidation committee.
The report, written by the Center for Governmental Research based on months of analysis of the two municipalities, focused on fire protection, police protection and employee benefits. The one major impact of consolidation it showed was that village taxes would reduce by about 50 percent while town taxes would increase by about 50 percent — the result of village services being paid for out of a larger pool of residents.
“My sense is … our collective view on the committee is that it probably is not worth moving forward toward full consolidation,” said Kristi Andersen, town councilor and consolidation committee chair. “It just doesn’t seem like the difficulty of merging these two somewhat different organizations is going to produce either better services or certainly not lower taxes overall.”
Mayor Kurt Wheeler agreed. “Overall, I think the report is very informative and objective and captures essence of the process to date, so I encourage people to read that,” he said. “My conclusion, as an individual and not speaking for the committee, is I think the study was very thorough, open-minded and objective. I’m not convinced that consolidation would produce those two outcomes [higher efficiency and lower taxes]. My prediction is that the committee will recommend to its respective municipal boards measures short of consolidation as we continue to share more services and gain efficiencies through increased cooperation, which we have been doing for several years.”
Both Andersen and Wheeler said that even if the committee decides not to recommend moving forward with consolidation, the process of looking into the possibility has produced excellent insights into how both the village and town governments work and how both can further cooperate to make their respective governments more efficient.
“It was really good to have us figure these things out and to spend this time in what was an extremely good committee,” Andersen said. “We came in with no real agendas. It’s been one of the best, most productive committees I’ve ever been on.”
Andersen said the consolidation discussion process is still ongoing and the committee will meet again soon to discuss the CGR report and decide where to go from here.
The complete CGR report can be found online at the both the village and town websites, and at cgr.org/cazenovia/documents.
