Monroe County Budget: Something weird’s going on
The needle on my corruptometer is starting to wiggle. It may be nothing, but spidey sense is tingling based on some recent info we’ve received, and the way things are going down.
Specifically, I’m talking about the whole switcheroo with agriculture money right at the last minute during the budget debate at the County Leg meeting on 11/15. The D&C had a little article about it here:
Monroe cutback stuns Cornell co-opFarm agency loses $175,000; new MCC institute to get funding instead(December 14, 2006) — Cornell Cooperative Extension-Monroe County is warning that it may have to drop half its programs after the County Legislature abruptly cut a substantial portion of its funding this week.In the 11th hour Tuesday night, the Republican-controlled Legislature voted as part of the 2007 budget to cut $175,000 and use the money instead for an Agriculture and Life Sciences Institute at Monroe Community College.The amendment came about 11 p.m., just before the $1.02 billion budget was approved during a meeting that lasted more than six hours.
$175k doesn’t sound like a lot of money when you toss it around with numbers like $1.02 BILLION. But it’s not chump change to the CCE:
While county and college officials say the institute will benefit the local agricultural industry, Cooperative Extension officials said they were blindsided by the news and fear cuts will hamper their ability to provide services to the community. The nonprofit agency, based at Cornell University, offers educational resources for youth development through 4-H, plus programs and training in horticulture, agriculture, nutrition and other fields.”It will obviously have a devastating impact of not being able to offer the programming we have offered in the past,” predicted Margaret O’Neill, executive director of the 93-year-old institution.
If they have to dump half their programs, then yeah, I’d call that a devastating impact, especially since the county money determines how much they get matched by state aid.And though the loss of the work the CCE does is bad, right up there is the ham-handed way this was handled.Here’s the reasoning behind the switch to MCC:
“We were not totally satisfied and we were getting a lot of complaints from the agricultural community,” Legislator Jack Driscoll, R-Henrietta, said Wednesday. “We started to investigate it and we determined we could get a higher level of service for the same amount of money by associating the program with MCC.”
Good grief! I’m just trying to imagine how far that kind of argument would go with my wife. Here’s a hint: not very damn far. Some questions come to mind:
1. GOP Leg members said: “We heard some complaints and investigated”.
- who complained? what was investigated? what were the results?2. What’s the metric by which the CCE was judged to be unworthy? For that kind of money every year, for such an institution, isn’t a more formal process required than an 11th hour switcheroo to the county budget?
3. What assurances do we have that an new, unproven program at MCC can do better?
Oh, and in a weird post-script, according to the comments on the D&C article:
Mr Bob King (who used to track agriculture for Cornell Cooperative Extension) resigned his position at Monroe CCE yesterday to take the position of Director at the new MCC Agricuture Institute.
So…what’s up with that? If they think the Monroe CCE was doing such a crappy job shouldn’t they be looking elsewhere for the director of the new institute?
Related posts:
CCE is focused on education, small farmers, animal owners, gardeners and other “retail level” customers, and is run by Cornell (not one of the Repub’s favorite institutions). The new institute will by focussed on “agribusiness” per their own press releases, and will be under direct county control (and patronage)since it is part of MCC. The only surprise is why it took them so long to do it. I guess they feel they can take the rural vote for granted now. If the users of CCE want to keep their programs they’re going to have to make a lot of noise. This would be a great opportunity for Dems to appeal to those voters.
You ought to know by know that the MCC administration is all mobbed up with the repubs, what do you think Ren Square is all about? The County Leg and administration view MCC as just another arm of “their” government. This is another in a long list of country-club deals that never faced any public scrutiny. Those guys ought to be ashamed at the type of closed government they’re running. Aren’t there sunshine laws in this state or something?
Re Bob King, I met the guy a couple of times and he always seemed like a pretty decent fellow. Foul mouthed, but pretty much OK as best as I could tell.
You’re absolutely right. But it’s one thing to have a general knowlege that “yeah, things are screwed up”. And quite another to realize, the more closely I pay attention and dig into these things, the extent of the screwed-up-ness.
It’s like they’ve just totally given up on we the people and are now, unashamedly, in it for personal gain and power.
I guess that could be a silver lining.
But, OMG, just what corporate ag needs, more subsidies. Screw the small farmer. Yeesh.
[...] The D&C had a front page piece on the new Monroe Community College’s new Agriculture and Life Sciences Institute yesterday. You may recall that this new Institute is being funded with money that was cut from the Cornell Cooperative Extension program. The D&C article doesn’t offer too much information but it does reiterate some of the strange facts about the sudden, possibly politically-motivated shift of funds: The institute was formed late last year when Monroe County legislators, at the end of a six-hour budget meeting, cut $175,000 from support of the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Monroe County, giving the money to MCC to establish the center. The extension office had no advance notice about the cut  nearly half of the $400,000 it receives annually from the county  or about the center. [...]