Time for control board to come out swinging
BRIAN ACKLEY Political Columnist
If Erie County's Control Board has made anything clear, it's that the future is not now.

That notion was reinforced just last week, when the seven-person panel again chose to sidestep the county administration's tiresome rope-a-dope defense. The control board has given Joel Giambra's four-year plan more second chances than Muhammad Ali had comebacks.

During that time, Ken Vetter has gone from the private sector, to being Giambra's budget director, to executive director of the control board, a dizzying ride making him the most uniquely qualified person to count the ever fewer public beans remaining in our principality's pockets. And wow, have we squandered lots and lots of beans.

"Erie County had the attitude, 'Hey, we've got money, we can spend it, all we have to do is go and access it.' For me it was nice knowing there was someone out there that wasn't necessarily me, so that I didn't have to be the bad guy 100 percent of the time," Vetter said. "I would have preferred initially that there had been more teeth to this, but I think there's still enough teeth at this point. I think this is where there might be some tension, that the board can determine when the financial plan is out of balance. It doesn't say it has to be declared by the county executive or legislature or state comptroller."

The most excruciating question of all is why the wait? Why are taxpayers continuing to dangle from the fingertips of a man who makes Ed Rutkowski look like a Wharton School of Business MBA?

"I think people are under the perception that if the county doesn't give us something we ask for - if we said give us a listing of all the furniture in the Rath Building and they don't give it to us - then we'd go hard," Vetter continued. "Maybe technically that's true, but do you want to take over a billion-dollar entity based on a minor technicality? It's got to be something significant."

Perhaps Vetter or control board Chairman Anthony Baynes should scour the Wilcox Mansion to see if Teddy Roosevelt left a big stick behind. So far, and under two different leaders, the control board has been nothing more than an accidental pool cue in the county's ribs.

Still, there's hope. It's no coincidence that the ultimate trigger will not be what the balance sheet reads in the next three months so much as what it projects in the next three years. It is almost impossible to imagine that in the next six weeks, the time frame in which the board has set before admonitions are finally replaced with meaningful action, that the Giambra administration will reverse years of its budgetary balderdash.

Vetter terms 2006 "OK" from a fiscal standpoint, but it goes steadily downhill from there. Next year is "problematic" and 2008, "is when things start showing up badly. Do you want to dump that on someone just coming into office and have them starting out behind the eight ball. When you're looking at someone in the political system, they look to the next election; that's their horizon. For us, that's an artificial horizon. Between now and 2009, the county is going to spend $4 billion. How much good or bad can you do with $4 billion?

"This was supposed to be the test year for a lot of stuff," Vetter added. "Things haven't been coming to fruition in a lot of circumstances. If the curve is set to go up at a 45-degree angle, and it's only going up at 20 degrees, the $100,000 problem in '06 turns into a $400,000 problem in '07, and $800,000 in '08 and $1.6 million in '09. It's not just saying everything is OK, everything is fine, we'll take care of it later. Later? You can't."

You can if you're still sitting atop county hall, apparently. Up until now. Vetter makes no prediction, but October might just be the time Erie's control board will finally answer the bell and come out swinging. Time to unveil its own version of the rope-a-dope, the one that finally lassos a county executive who's not-to-be-feared counter punch has been nothing more than a, for now, harmless flurry of fallacious fiscal forecasts.

Only then will taxpayers feel they are, finally, in a fair fight.

(Second of a two-part series.)

(Brian Ackley is a columnist for the Weekly Independent Newspapers of Western New York. Opinions expressed here are those of the author.)