County Leg: Erie County Politics Similar to Monroe
County Legislature races are kicking off all over. TAP has a piece up about a county leg race over in Erie County (which contains Buffalo, like Monroe contains Rochester). The incumbant, Democrat Kathy Konst, most recently known around here for her potential candidacy for NY-26 and the state senate seat held by Sen. Volker, is being targeted by a GOP challenger.
He’s trying to make an issue over Konst trying to put the brakes on Erie County’s GOP county exec, Chris Collins.
But the most interesting part of the TAP article, to me, is the highlighting of the Erie County GOP’s funding model, which bears a striking similarity to ours here in Monroe county: funnel money to the county exec, who then shifts it around to various candidates in return for their loyalty.
From the article:
Kathy has also had several high-profile fights with Collins over the county budget–and as I said with regard to the challenger to “obstructionist” Michelle Iannello, attempting to obstruct incompetance is not a bad thing.
Now that appears to have extended to Konst, with Fudoli indicating he has met with Collins and hopes he will assist him politically and financially.”I can expect he would maybe help me in that aspect,” Fudoli said of Collins’ financial backing. “It’s certainly something I would ask him for.”
And there’s the onion. Each and every one of these candidates is effectively running as a proxy for Chris Collins, in what you could be forgiven for thinking of as a “Vote Lapdog” campaign. All of them are going to be so politically indebted to Collins if they got elected that they wouldn’t be able to provide real checks and balances government without losing their sugar daddy.
Remind you of anything around here? Like county legislature candidates in lock-step with Maggie Brooks? Here’s a visual from the last county leg election to get you started:
Pretty much all the GOP county leg candidates 2 years ago got assistance from Maggie, cross-promoted themselves with her (see image above), and have voted with her and the GOP since then.
How’s their rubberstamping of Maggie’s agenda working out for us?
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