The civic-minded Kevin Gaughan—attorney, former mayoral candidate, proselytizer for regional government—is back in the news this week, and he’s got a number for you. Several numbers, actually: 439 politicians serving in 47 governments within Erie County, at an aggregate cost of $32,140,386 per year in salary and healthcare and retirement benefits.

On Wednesday evening, October 25, Gaughan unveiled a new study, completed over the course of this past summer with the help of a grant from the John R. Oshei Foundation and a team of nine second-year law students from the University at Buffalo. The study is called “Paying Our Politicians: What 439 Elected Officials Cost Us.”

Or, more informally, “The Cost.” The data that Gaughan’s team gathered—through personal visits to the halls of government throughout the county and, when that failed, through 23 FOIA requests—can be read in detail at The Cost.org. The study contrasts the number of governments and politicians in the Greater Buffalo area with similar cities—Baltimore, Indianapolis and Charlotte—as well as with New York City. (See the chart on page 14 for the results.)

The purpose of this report, Gaughan says, is to breathe new life into the conversation about regional government that he helped to initiate with a series of seminars that began at Chautauqua Institution in 1997. Erie County Executive Joel Giambra’s political misfortunes have dealt that conversation a setback, Gaughan believes. He hopes that revealing the amount of money—always a sensational subject—it takes to pay our politicians—rarely beloved of the people—might help to spark a popular reform movement that will lead to a more sleek and effective government.

To help light that spark, Gaughan intends to take his study before every municipality in the county that has not recently downsized their government already and ask them to sign a compact, agreeing to reduce the number of legislators in their municipality by two. The compact will become binding if three quarters of the municipalities ratify it.

That would reduce the number of politicians by about 15 percent. And be warned, local pols: It could mean that Gaughan will be building a county-wide constituency behind this study in the months to come. Gaughan spoke with Artvoice about the project last week.

Artvoice: How did the idea for this project arise?

Kevin Gaughan: There are three reasons why I did this. The first, on top of the 72,000 folks we’ve lost since 1970, on top of the now three-decade-long drop in the housing stock value and per-capita income, on top of the establishment of not one but two outside control boards, we’ve learned this past summer that 30 percent of our local young population left Western New York. That’s number one: Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working.

Number two, yesterday we saw the stock market reach another all-time high, which means we are in the midst of the seventh economic resurgence that has swept the nation and lifted everyone except Western New York. The most recent Census discloses there are more people in the City of Buffalo who make less than $5,000 than there are who make more than $50,000. And right next door is this political class that’s walking around and speaking as if everything is okay.

Third, I remain absolutely determined in my conviction that Western New Yorkers deserve the best possible government they can have. And by that I mean government that’s not an impediment to economic growth but rather a constructive partner. We’re talking about creating a sustainable economy that grows. We don’t have that yet.

AV: How does the number of politicians and their paychecks figure into the observation?

KG: We have a marked, unique inability to create consensus for change here. That’s a cancer on any community, let alone one that is struggling as much as ours. That’s what led me back to the idea of too many governments, which we’ve been discussing for so long and have been unable to do anything about.

I thought that perhaps this was a new approach. I asked myself the question: Why is it so difficult to create consensus for change, why do so many great ideas die on the vine? Why do our aspirations always end up in the clouds and our hopes down the drain? Because there are so many folks to convince.

The little light bulb that went off in my head last winter that really started to get the ball rolling was that a lot of folks know about this inordinately large number of public servants, but no one knows how much they cost.

AV: And your research has led you to these figures: $32 million per year for 439 politicians serving in 47 governments.

KG: I don’t care if you’re San Diego, California, Palm Beach, Florida, let alone Buffalo, New York—that’s too many politicians and that’s too expensive.

AV: But isn’t the real waste in government—the patronage, the contracts, the spending practices that many believe, even if they don’t know for a fact, are corrupt—isn’t that mostly embedded in bureaucracies? That’s a more difficult study to undertake, but isn’t the greater expense there?

KG: You’ve put your finger right on it. That was another impetus of this idea.

This study addresses just the cost of the bosses, before we get to the paramount purpose of government, which is public safety, transportation, education, culture. Those costs dwarf this cost. And there have been several studies over the years that demonstrate the high cost of government, and that’s what we’re talking about. We’ve all been lamenting and trying to find ways to reduce the bureaucracy and reduce the number of people who are employed by the largest employer here in the Buffalo Niagara region, which is government.

But we haven’t been able to. And here, I think, is the reason why. Because all those employees, all their roads lead back to the Rome of the politician who first gave them a job. We’re never going to get to that bureaucracy, the body, until we start cutting off some of the heads.

I think that the most dramatic illustration of that was at the height of the county’s collapse—while we were facing hundreds of millions of dollars of budget gaps and the like—not one, not two, but three different politicians went to petition a court asserting that their employees should not be let go.

They didn’t do that because the system is working; they didn’t do that because we have a really successful community. They did that because those were political appointees who wanted protection in exchange for the deal, which is: We do your campaign work, we keep our jobs.

AV: Was it difficult for your team to gather information from the municipalities?

KG: There were several instances when government employees would say, behind a closed door, “Thank God somebody is asking about these benefits and amounts, because no one really knows.”

There’s no doubt that we have difficulties here on all levels of government, and Albany is imposing terrible burdens on us, but what this study discloses is that we’re doing a lot of damage ourselves by the manner in which we’re allocating these funds. Turns out there are a lot of public funds here in Western New York.

This $32 million, taken from the perspective of a decade, means that in the past 10 years our politicians have received over a quarter of a billion dollars. Would we be better off if we had allocated even a portion of those funds for some much-needed social services, waterfront development? We could have taken down the Skyway. We could have hired 200 more Buffalo city teachers. We could have remediated the Black Rock channel where those children are swimming in feces. We could have done simple things like repaired the Martin Luther King [Park] fountains so that kids on the East Side have someplace to go. Or, shockingly, heaven forbid, we could have actually lowered property taxes and perhaps attracted investment and more jobs.

AV: I notice that the list you just gave starts with public spending and ends with a giveback to taxpayers. Nonetheless, this project has a conservative flavor; it trades on the notion that government is too big, too numerous, inefficient, somehow corrupt.

KG: I’d like to correct that impression. I’m a Democrat. I’m a progressive. I believe in government. I believe in the notion of an activist government assisting an aspirational people.

But there is no one in this city or region who could argue that that is what is taking place today. I think anyone who thinks that all these governments should continue to exist—they’re many things, but progressive is not among them.

I for many years talked about having efficient government, effective government and equitable government. What I’ve concluded today is you can’t be equitable, you can’t be fair to this city, unless you create more efficiency. Chief among the headlines in this study is that the highest concentration of politicians, it turns out, is in the suburbs. I think what this study reveals is a wholly unnecessary and unsustainable ratio of legislators to citizens in the suburbs. I think it’s wrong.

AV: But there are conservatives who are going to argue that this is what they’ve been saying all along. They’re going to say, “Welcome back to the Republican Party, Kevin.”

KG: I question if there is any difference between the two parties today. There are only two parties in America today: incumbents and non-incumbents. My sense of politics today in America is the Republican Party is the party of bad ideas and the Democrats are the party of no ideas.

We purposely made this study non-personal—there are no names; and nonpartisan—there are no parties. I think one of the values of this study is it shows you how easy it is for citizens to view government as just their own representative or just their own town. This study forces them to move back far enough to see the system as a whole, and flip through pages and see numbers and numbers, and costs and costs and costs, until they can’t help but say, “It’s too much.”

AV: What do you propose those citizens do about it? This can’t be sorted out by the political class the study targets, right?

KG: I think if it could be, it would have been. I think that changing and reforming local government comes under the category of the great citizen-led reform movements, which go back to stopping wars and spreading and enhancing civil rights. They traditionally start with young people, they spread to churches and other cultural and community organizations and the like. And then what happens is politics works—politicians have to adapt to the will of the people.

I am trying to find a way, through impartial information and facts, to illustrate to citizens why we’re not working as a community. The goal of this is to engage citizens in a conversation. What I’m trying to do this time is to inform the conversation with raw, hard data. So that every single citizen, after this study is released and our Web site is up, has access to rather dramatic and unsettling information with which they can better judge local government’s performance.

AV: A lot of outer municipalities are going to look at their numbers and say, “Wow, I didn’t realize we paid them so little. Home rule is great for us.” They may not like their mayor, they may not like their trustees, put what’s to stop folks in East Aurora from saying, “Gosh, we only pay our six trustees $3,000 a year, and $5,000 for the mayor. This isn’t our problem. Forget Buffalo and Lackawanna.”

KG: As long as we continue to sit and say, “I’m okay,” while our brothers and sisters just three boundaries away—which happens to be about four miles—are struggling, we’re going to lose. That’s number one.

Number two, I think the only boundary in America that exists in any way, shape or form in this day and age is the urban-suburban boundary. It’s the only one that informs politicians’ view of the world and has a social, racial and geographic impact. In that case, the cost of all these suburbs is—again in the aggregate—is more than half of the $32 million cost.

Third, and perhaps most important, this report concentrates on the financial cost, but at the end of the day what these 439 politicians cost this community is much more dear than money. They cost us leadership. Because somewhere in the noise of 439 women and men talking, existing, is lost any accountable leadership. And as a result the community continues to drift sideways if not backwards.

From the inception of this project, I never believed that the idea of consolidating these jurisdictions would ever take place. We derive too much of our identity from these places. But the fact that a person is from Hamburg shouldn’t preclude them from being able to know and feel that they are of Buffalo, that they are of something larger and that they have to aspire to something larger than themselves and their own community.

If we’re going to continue to have 24 towns, 16 villages, three cities, plus the county, let alone the state and federal governments, maybe we could have fewer politicians doing that work. We have in Erie County more politicians than sit in the House of Representatives. Four hundred thirty-five women and men can represent the entire nation, but we need 439 to represent just Erie County.

AV: How do you propose to make that happen?

KG: In addition to providing this information, I am also going to offer a solution. It’s going to be my solution, and I’m going to provide it in the spirit of inviting the whole community to visit the Web site and offer theirs. I’m going to take this work before each of the towns and cities and villages, along with this agreement I’ve drafted, a regional compact, the terms of which are that if I can get three quarters of the jurisdictions to sign up, then each of them will reduce their number of legislators, their town council members or village trustees, by two. That will reduce this number by 86 politicians.

AV: When Buffalo’s Common Council was reduced from 13 to nine members, many African-Americans in the city viewed that as an assault on their representation, and in large part they weren’t wrong. That reduction, particularly the loss of the at-large seats, has reduced their representation. People in, say, Holland may raise a similar objection: Who’s representing my neighborhood? Who is representing me, and how far away? Do they know our problems or even the names of the streets in our town?

KG: With respect to the African-American community, they weren’t just in large measure right—they were absolutely right. In the over 1,000 city legislatures that have reduced the size of their urban governments in the past 20 years, only one before Buffalo eliminated the at-large seats. The at-large seats, of course, are the ones that are the most democratic, and in many instances held by African Americans. The way we went about doing that was wrong, and it did harm their voice.

But I’m not sure that’s applicable to what I’m talking about here in the suburbs. One, there’s a far too obvious racial problem that we face as a nation. That has to be reflected in the way we govern ourselves and represent minorities. Secondly, though, the idea of reducing the size of the Holland Town Council from five to three does not in any way shape or form affect one man, one vote or the racial makeup of Holland. I think, as well, if you went to the same Holland person and said, “Do you think you have a voice in local Holland government,” their answer is going to be, number one, “No,” and number two, “I can’t tell what’s going on between the Village of Alden and the Town of Holland and the County of Erie, all these different levels.”

Finally, I think in the past 10 years, the idea of representation has been trumped by the imperative of growth. I think folks would be willing consider even a slight reduction in voice if it meant less costs, less taxes, more economic growth, more opportunity to keep their young people here.

Bruce Katz from the Brookings Institution, who was at my second conversation on regionalism, said it so succinctly: He said the more government you have, the less competitive you are. We have about the most government in America and I think the effects on our competitiveness are clear.

AV: How do we compare?

KG: In our comparative jurisdiction section, looking at like-sized communities, with comparable populations, comparable old urban center problems and the like—for instance, what we call Greater Baltimore, which is Baltimore County, Howard County and the City of Baltimore. In those two counties, where we in Erie County have 45 governments, they have three—the two counties and the City of Baltimore. The rest are towns and locations with names, but they’re not incorporated municipalities, with all the concomitant costs, elections, public officials. As a result, their community, which has about 800,000 more residents than us, has one tenth the number of politicians: 33 to 341.

The question is how did our political class establish itself and sustain itself and justify itself. In large measure they did it in a way not unlike the old Soviet Union system. You can look at any book about urban America from the beginning of the last century right up to the 1970s: If you lived in Chicago or you lived in Toledo or you lived in Cleveland and you wanted something done, you had to know your politician. You had to call your common council member to fix a pothole, to get a job for someone, to fix something at the playground. Those are actually functions that people in departments, that government employees, should be doing. Citizens shouldn’t have to go to the politicians.

Now that system has seeped into the suburbs. Let’s take again, for example, the Town of Holland. Their ratio of legislators is 721 to one. They have five legislators for 3,600 people. If the City of Buffalo had the same ratio of legislators to citizens, there’d be 388 Common Council members.

How do people put up with that? Their first reaction is going to be, “Well, see, I call Joe, and Joe helps me when I need a permit for the business.” Instead of calling the permits department, which exists, and the economic development department, which exists, it all goes through the politicians. That’s what killed major American cities in the last century.

AV: And you believe that death by politics is holding back the entire region.

KG: This system of government here in our region has lost the ability—whether it be the City of Buffalo, the County of Erie or any of these smaller jurisdictions—to deliver basic services to those most in need. And that to me is what government is all about. So once you acknowledge that, then you have to start asking the question: Where’s the money going?

Willie Sutton used to say he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. I think if Willie Sutton were here today, he wouldn’t be robbing banks. He’d be robbing government, because that’s where the money is.