With all the talk at the State level about the need for local governments like villages to "learn to consolidate," citizens can easily be misled about how difficult "consolidation" is, versus what is already going on in "cooperation." 

 

Consolidation is a technical legal term that can enmesh two local governments in protracted analyses of different tax bases paying for arguably duplicative capital equipment with differing original cost bases and differing remaining lives (e.g., try "consolidating" two sanitation districts into one, each original with buildings and equipment acquired at different times and with differing quality of construction, and being paid off by different groups of taxpayers at different rates of interest!). Cooperation can be targeted at specific property, equipment and/or services (rather than everything an entity owns and does), and can be accomplished through a simple contract between two local governments.

 

Article 5-G of the NYS General Municipal Law provides for "Municipal Cooperation." It recites a state intention to facilitate municipal cooperation in the sharing of certain equipment and services. Villages are included in the definition of "municipal corporations," and permission is given for the "joint provision of any municipal facility, service, activity, project or undertaking" where each of the cooperating municipal corporations has the legal power to conduct such service individually. For example, if two villages individually have the power to clean streets, then the two villages may contract together to clean each other's streets. This allows for the two villages to agree in advance on which services will be shared, and at what cost (thus automatically allocating to each village's tax base its contractually agreed upon share).

 

Many villages are already cooperating to jointly provide specific public services, and doing so without the need for the recently well-publicized but poorly understood "dissolution and/or consolidation."

 

Perhaps a conversation with your geographically adjoining mayors would be in order. Can you combine purchasing power to buy (and share) equipment? Can police be "rented" from a neighboring village (instead of solely rely on the County), thereby saving you the cost of creating your own department, and simultaneously saving some of your neighboring village's police costs? Street cleaning? This author suspects you are already sharing a myriad of services, and you may wish to better publicize what you are already doing (or may in the future do) in this area.