ONE LOCKPORT? Ex-mayor Betsch makes plea for united city, town

By Joyce Miles<br><a href="mailto:joyce.miles@lockportjournal.com">E-mail Joyce</a>

So you live in Lockport. City or town?

How about just “Lockport?”

Former Mayor Raymond C. Betsch issued a public plea to the city and town councils Wednesday, or perhaps a dare, depending on your point of view.

In separate visits to municipal halls less than 4 miles apart, he asked Lockport’s leadership — 10 elected councilmen, a mayor and a town supervisor — to start planning for a future in which the town and city are no longer doughnut and hole, they’re whole.

“Coexistence is working well, but total and complete unity could be so much more efficient and desirable. ... The town and the city should merge into one political entity,” Betsch said. “It is the manifest destiny of the city and town to be united into one, and as one to become one of the best little big cities in the state of New York.”

Members of the two bodies knew the remarks were coming — Betsch presented a lengthy letter articulating his view to Mayor Michael Tucker and Supervisor Marc Smith a few weeks ago — but few others did. While the rest of Lockport goes about business as usual, Betsch determined he must end his lengthy silence about the “dream” he’s had for Lockport for nearly 40 years. He’s 85 years old and suspects time is running short, for both him and his beloved community.

The last of the industrial giants that once sustained Lockport, Harrison Radiator Division/Delphi Corp., is a shadow of its former self. National recession is a veritable depression in overburdened Western New York. The symptoms of sickness are profound and undeniable: job cuts, disinvestment, youth flight, spiraling costs, crashing revenue and, all the while, heavy pressure on local government to manage a mighty feat: keep up the amenities without turning to taxpayers for more.

A body — the city and its people, the town and its people — can only take so much.

Were the city and town to merge, Betsch believes, the whole could be leaner and the lot of all residents improved. Service duplication would end; greater economies of scale would be achieved; a larger population base would attract more commerce as well as more government operating aid; and each partner could share with the other its unique and desirable assets — for example, professional public safety services by the city and upward mobility by the town.

“There are a lot of intangibles, things that are hard to put into dollars and cents, that could improve everybody’s lot,” Betsch said. “I hold no thought that I can come up with a plan that will work, but I think anything that reduces costs and improves services should be looked at.”

A none-too-attractive dance partner?

Given the realities of doughnut and hole — one’s on a continuous upward path while the other declines — he understands making them whole is a tough sell. Presently, there’s no obvious benefit to townspeople from a merger; they get their streets plowed, their garbage picked up and police and fire protection just as city residents do but, according to figures Smith already had on hand from the state comptroller’s office, at about one-third of the cost.

In 2006, the figures show, the per-person cost of running the town, less water and sewer operations, was $675 — and $1,473 in the city. Dedicated police and paid fire services drive the higher cost, as do the city’s bigger payroll and legacy bill.

The town has 38 employees to the city’s 238 employees, according to City Clerk Dick Mullaney; the city’s legacy costs include guaranteed lifetime health coverage for current and future retirees, as well as all of their state pension contributions.

Betsch knows the political realities preclude any notion of a city-town merger in the near term, but he’s pressing leaders to start laying the groundwork for, someday now.

As the town continues to grow, he argues, it will become its own “city around a city” and will face urban pressures and expectations. Transplants from elsewhere may come into the town expecting urban niceties like routine police patrol and speedy, professional rescue services — things the City of Lockport already has that it surely would not want to duplicate.

Townspeople already are benefiting from city services in ways they likely don’t think about, Betsch’s wife, Shirley, adds. Tax-exempt not-for-profits including churches, service organizations and the library don’t belong only to city residents — but the bills for their city-provided snowplowing, garbage pickup and police/fire protection do.

City’s loss was town’s gain

Betsch says he was convinced long ago that the fate of the city and town are intertwined. When he ran for mayor the first time, in 1971, he raised the merger topic in a candidates’ forum — and didn’t get a rise out of anyone. Then, after he was elected, he tried hitting up then-town Supervisor Floyd Snyder to have a look. Snyder dismissed him handily, he recalls — and in retrospect it was no wonder.

While space-challenged downtown was decimated by Urban Renewal in the 1960s and 1970s, Snyder was capitalizing on retail trends preferring wide open spaces to erect malls, “big box” stores and ample nearby parking. In less than 20 years, Betsch said, South Transit Road became Lockport’s new main street — and neighboring municipalities that traditionally had helped sustain each other now competed fiercely to attract new business to one over the other.

And the kicker in it all, Betsch said: It was the city’s own fault. From the time Urban Renewal was conceived in the late 1950s, a succession of mayoral administrations and business leaders mishandled it. The idea was to get rid of blight and free up space for large developments, but opinion leaders never could be convinced they should tear down blocks of buildings without having committed replacements. Replacement construction was hodgepodge and insufficient to meet the demands of bigger retailers. In the meantime, the city had extended sewer service into the southern part of the town — a reflection of the entities’ traditional support for one another, Betsch said — and sewer availability ended up making South Transit the better place for big boxes to go.

“The town literally sucked our downtown out of Downtown and put hundreds of thousands of square feet of business properties on what’s now known as the Transit Corridor, without regard for the detriment to the city,” Betsch said. “In my mind’s eye I can see millions of dollars floating around downtown, and the town sucking it out like a vacuum cleaner.”

It’s that image — and the belief that two Lockports cannot both flourish — that first caused Betsch to embrace the idea of a city-town merger. Thirty-seven years later, he says, one of the few regrets he has about his time as mayor is that he didn’t use the office to advocate for it.

“The time for this was 30 years ago; I’m sorry I didn’t push it more forcefully,” he said.

Who wants the whole shebang?

If their gut reactions to Betsch’s plea are any indication, it’s doubtful political leaders either side of the town-city line will push the consolidation concept now. Tucker and Common Council members lavish praise on Betsch for remaining passionate about Lockport long after he left City Hall, but they’re just as likely as town officials to recite the city’s negatives — payroll/legacy and infrastructure costs — as a deal breaker.

In addition, Smith asserted the city doesn’t need a rescue from the town because predictions of cities dying out are off-base. Current trends actually favor suburban-to-urban movement, he said, as people seek out urban “chic” — one-of-a-kind old homes, tighter knit neighborhoods and “community centers” where goods and services are within walking distance.

“I don’t see the city rotting,” he said. “In fact it’s quite the opposite. Suburbia is going back to the cities now. Everything is cyclical. ... The town and the city can and do work together where it’s mutually beneficial; we don’t have to become one to do that.”

Those who see the town on the “losing” end of a merger are missing the big picture, suggests Kevin Gaughan, the nationally recognized advocate of government consolidation and downsizing. Alongside the ample evidence of Western New York suffering greatly from too much government, he said, Betsch’s metaphor about doughnut, hole and whole speak to common sense.

“Right now, the town is better off than the doughnut hole, but long-term, no entity can exist without a vibrant center. That’s the city,” he said. “Let’s put it this way: If the doughnut hole is crumbling, and the table on which the doughnut sits is crumbling, what do you suppose will happen to the doughnut?”

Contact reporter Joyce Miles at 439-9222, ext. 6245.

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