TOM CHRISTY: A story about nothing

Any fan of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld will remember Jerry and George and their desire to create a television pilot. What’s the show about: nothing. We’ll do a show about nothing! Sometimes life is exactly the same way.

In government there are schedules to keep, committees to be formed and press releases to be invented because if you don’t feed the media, they might think up something of their own to talk about. Staying busy — looking busy — is very important in government circles.

But looking busy in government can be expensive. Just think about every time New York state faces an election and a budget crisis at the same time. You wouldn’t have to think back too far; in fact, you could posit that it would be hard to imagine a time when those two things weren’t happening at the same time. The governor calls the Legislature back to Albany, paying each one of them $160 per day for food and shelter, and nothing gets accomplished. The smokescreen costs taxpayers, feeds the media, and it’s a show about nothing.

While we can recognize the nothingness and expense of this nothing government, our focus should be on the politicians themselves, and how do we attract quality. Government is, after all, not a block of granite with a date engraved, but people; government is our friends and neighbors. What’s needed now, more than anything, is a way to attract people who don’t have a personal agenda; people who don’t wish to stay a long time; people whose motivation is to contribute a little chunk of their talent to their government, rather than secure health care at taxpayer expense.

After 40 years of economic and quality of life decline in our area, we are desperate for a rebirth. The Internet is a vital cog in this rebirth of government. It is a viral information dissemination system we need to embrace fully rather than fear. Viruses are usually considered bad things. Not so with information. The more information in the hands of the people, the better the people will be governed.

Why embrace full information disclosure rather than stick with the partial disclosure we are force-fed? Because we need to be able to have a frank and honest discussion of situations that may, without full disclosure, morph into conspiracy theories, tarnish good people, promote bad people, and keep all the other people from even trying to get involved.

Let me give you an example of this.

In a recent press release, Attorney General Cuomo exposes debt collection practice known as “sewer service.” It’s a great thing to expose. A company exists for the purpose of serving notice on people with overdue bills. Other companies hire this company to serve those people with notices, and the service company takes the fee then literally throws all the paperwork in the trash and never notifies anyone.

There are many victims in this story but really only one guilty party. Yet in the press release issued by the attorney general he lists all the people who hired this company. What did they do wrong? Obviously, naming dozens of prominent law firms, rather than one process-serving firm, gets headlines.

Naming an elected official in this situation gets you even more attention. Such was the case with Niagara County Legislator Jason Cafarella, who woke up one morning and found his name included in the attorney general’s press release. Few people get completely blindsided in life, so his experience is hard for most of us to imagine. But think of buying a product, seeing a recall for a defect, and then seeing that you are being accused by the government because you bought the product.

In the age of newspapers, this is a critical accusation, because once it’s in print, it’s generally hard to set the record straight over the ensuing years. But in the age of the Internet, more information can come out; people can intelligently add information to the argument. It’s possible to dig deeper and publicize the entire story. The attorney general — hopefully — is playing by old rules from an age that is fast expiring.

Niagara County has a lot of problems; being the highest taxed municipality in the nation is, sadly, only one of them. Jason Cafarella is not one of those problems. Only by embracing the power of information sharing can we continue to encourage people when things appear bad but aren’t, and expose and eject people when things appear good but are corrupt.

Tom Christy is the founder of FAIR Government, an educational foundation. www.fair-government.org. E-mail him at aim1986@mac.com.