How many politicians does it take ...
... to screw in a light bulb? Depends on where you pay your taxes.
I've spent some time on Kevin Gaughan's Web site, which includes a study on the cost of local government in Erie County. For the record, we pay $28.8 million a year for our current state of affairs when it comes to just cities, towns and villages.
A quick show of hands: How many think we're getting fair value?
Thought so.
We've got 393 city, town and village elected officials. There's an elected official for every 2,371 man, woman and child in the county.
Their pay, health insurance and pension premiums cost us $11.5 million a year. Their support staffs cost another $11.2 million. That works out to $24.35 per resident annually.
The most over-governed, as you might imagine, are the smaller villages and towns. The Village of Franham has a politician for every 64 residents. Almost makes the runners up seem efficient - the Village of North Collins and the towns of Brant, Wales, Holland and Sarnia, which have between 200 and 300 pols per resident.
At the other end of the spectrum, Buffalo has one elected official for every 11,656 residents, followed by the towns of Amherst, Cheektowaga, Tonawanda and Hamburg.
Here's a table with the rankings of all 44 cities, towns and villages.
Yeah, you read right - 44.
Who's getting the best bang for the buck?
Elected officials and their primary support staff cost $9.57 per resident in Amherst, followed by Cheektowaga, Lackawanna and a couple of the larger villages, Hamburg and Kenmore.
The costliest? Franham, at $93.38, followed by Brant, the Town of North Collins, the Town of Colden and the Village of North Collins.
Put another way, if you live in the Village Franham, you're also also living in the Town of Brant, and your cost per elected official for the two layers of government tops $178. For a family of four, that comes to more than $700. Not all of that is coming out of your pocket, as state aid picks up part of the tab, but geez, that's a lot of money.
A family of four in Amherst is paying under $40.
Anybody think the folks in Farnham are getting 19 times better government?
I didn't think so.
Here's a table ranking cities, towns and villages by cost per pol.
Want to pay with the numbers yourself? Here's a spreadsheet with all the details. Play to your heart's content, and by all means share with you come up with.
And just for kicks, if you didn't read my post from a couple of weeks ago, go here. It's worth it if for nothing more than the picture of Barney Fife.
