Another day in the asylum

For most paleolithic City-of-Buffalo-haters, (paging Sandy Beach & 90% of his listeners), it's been a repeated mantra that the City is mismanaged. In the 80s, when the County was in fiscal crisis, the City gave the County its share of the sales tax. Now that the City's in a fiscal crisis, the County is loath to return the penny to the City because the City "needs to get its own house in order" first. Hypocrites. Now we find out that Erie County is in another fiscal crisis. Yay. Two simultaneous fiscal crises in Erie County. When a brilliant guy like Kevin Gaughan runs for mayor, he loses because he's not originally from Buffalo. When the control board imposes some fiscal sanity on Buffalo, many of them are vilified because they're not from Buffalo. Well, City and County leaders who have been running the show for the last 30 years, and running the City and County deep into the cold ground have been from Buffalo. They have done such an incompetent job running things around here, that it's about time some intrepid outsiders started getting things in shape around here. So, King Joel submitted a budget that made a lot of assumptions. He assumed that the State Legislature would approve a homerule request for an early retirement package. Who in their right mind would rely on the State Legislature to do anything for anyone on time? They haven't been able to pass a budget on time in 20 years, and this is a corrupt and inept political system that's basically run by three guys, two of whom are Republicans. King Joel also assumed that there would be some sort of Medicaid relief by now. Yeah, fat chance. I'm sure Albany is just champing at the bit to take over the bloated, inefficient, overpriced Medicaid system that they've expanded exponentionally over the years, while laying a huge unfunded mandate burden on County governments. Yeah, that's right around the corner. /sarcasm.

[Democratic County Legislator Al] DeBenedetti said the Legislature's majority sees dozens of vacant positions that can be deleted to save money and lead to a better budget, but he suspects Giambra wants to keep the positions so he can refill them someday without the Legislature's approval. 'How do they know?' Giambra said when reminded the Democrats feel they've identified vacant jobs that can be eliminated. 'They are not the managers of county government. They weren't elected to manage county government. I was, all right? And my departments know which positions aren't necessary and which ones are. There should be some deference to the people who run the day-to-day operations of county government.'

Mr. Giambra, what you and the other cretins running the show around here don't know could fill Ralph Wilson Stadium.