Some suggestions for the governor

JOEL GIAMBRA

Erie County

Executive When Eliot Spitzer said in his State of the State speech that New York State has a few thousand too many municipalities, I saluted.

Because for the first time in my recollection, a governor said what scholars and policy professionals have been saying for decades, that New York State is choking on too many little governments.

Sprawl without growth, which is endemic to upstate, results from what Cornell University scholars have identified as localized land-use planning practices that are preserved by all those villages, towns and cities that keep zoning local rather than regional.

Get him or her into a safe place, and every county executive from Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Schenectady, Albany and Binghamton will admit that regional government is the only way to go. It seems that we now have a governor who thinks the same way, and I can't wait to help him make regionalism a reality.

The only way it can happen is if the governor makes it happen and here is what he can do:

+ Make assistance to distressed municipalities conditional on shared information-technology investment. County governments are the perfect hosts for IT that can serve village, town and city accounting systems for everything from personnel management to purchasing to road repair.

+ Make sewer districts prove to the state Department of Environmental Conservation that their plans for overflow and lateral discharge are consistent with the needs of the watershed and not just the municipality's.

+ Make the implementation of the new statewide wireless emergency communications system the cornerstone of regional

public safety planning, because neither crime nor chemical spills nor natural disasters respect municipal identity.

+ Set up some demonstration projects, with short and tight timetables, say merging Buffalo and Erie County by 2010.

In the late 1990s, many of us in Buffalo watched the provincial government in Ontario act with alacrity and dispatch to force a merger of the old steel city of Hamilton with its county. A few years later, we watched in delight as Ontario helped Hamilton Wentworth merge with six suburban townships and became the Regional City of Hamilton. Regionalism works. I respect local sentiment. I will always have an emotional attachment to my old home neighborhood.

But I do not have an emotional attachment to the sewer department, the zoning board or even to the type of uniform that shows up when I call 911. I just want efficiency and professionalism, no matter whether I'm in the city or the suburbs.

This issue transcends party, but it challenges history. I want Gov. Spitzer to help make upstate cities into regional cities, like the greatest regional city, New York.