Privatize it……. Turn it over to the county so they can make it a patronage pit? We pay higher water rates than the desert southwest, what’s wrong with this picture?
The Buffalo News: City & Region: Konst calls for end to Water Authority
Would fold operations into county government
An Erie County lawmaker has introduced a measure calling for dissolving the independent Erie County Water Authority and folding its operations into county government.
Legislator Kathy Konst, D-Lancaster, said the authority had been established in the middle of the last century to build a water network and then go out of business, not hang around for additional decades.
Her proposal to dismantle the authority, which serves 550,000 people in Buffalo’s suburbs, follows a call by James P. Keane, the Democratic candidate for county executive, to make the Water Authority’s operations part of county government.
Both Keane and Konst say the authority is riddled with patronage and waste.
The county chairmen of the two major political parties exert power over the authority by naming its three-member board and agreeing on its two top executives. The middle ranks accommodate more patronage appointments.
“In its early years, the Erie County Water Authority was a role model,” said George F. Hasiotis, a board member from 1996 to 2000 who says folding the agency into county government can save millions of dollars.
“By the 1970s, local party bosses together with county legislators imposed a culture of direct political control over the [Water Authority],” he said. “From that time to today, both political parties share in the exploitation by providing patronage jobs and contracts to insiders.”
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Tags: Erie County Insanity
The City of Buffalo privatized their water system in 2001…trust me, privatization is NOT the way to go in this area of municipal services.
BTW, Good press in the Buffalo News…
http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/story/193920.html