‘Government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan famously said.
Apparently, Richard P. Miller, Jr., wasn’t paying attention.
His second month as mayor of Oneonta ended the other day, and Miller hasn’t done nothing yet; which is to say, he’s done quite a bit.Just days into the job, the new mayor was faced his first crisis: The Oneonta Tigers, mainstay of Damaschke Field and source of community pride, had been tempted away to Norwich, Conn., a larger market with a bigger field.
Before the Tigers had even gotten on the bus, Miller was declaring there would be baseball at Damaschke – “by this summer,” yet.
Bold words, indeed. But within days – hours, perhaps – he had scoured the New York Collegiate Baseball League and came home with a draft pick: the Saratoga Phillies.
“That was a high point for me,” he said of his fledgling tenure. “I love things when they work really well.”
The mayor had begun to line up investors – Bob Hanft, Hartwick College trustees’ chairman from Miller’s days as president, had taken the lead.
But that wasn’t even necessary. The owners, Keith Rogers and Dan Scaring, are continuing to shoulder the financial burden, and so the deed is done.
•More important, perhaps, was another firm first step: convening Common Council members in a day-long retreat on Saturday, Jan. 9, in a City Hall basement conference room.Common Council’s regular meetings are formal affairs, governed by Roberts’ Rules, not conducive to open-ended discussion and reflection. The six-hour retreat allowed that. The pizza lunch gave the alderpeople a chance to chat, to joke, to get to know each other.
But the day was plenty structured in terms of what Miller wanted to communicate: That the city had been overspending by $1 million a year, a rate that would bankrupt it by 2012.
He didn’t declaim or blame. He simply shared the facts he had marshalled. They were compelling argument enough.
Miller also streamlined Common Council’s many committees to four – Human Resources, Finance & Administration, Facilities/Technology, and Marketing & Development – and assigned a senior city staff members to each as recorder, administrator and expediter.
In other words, the operation was stripped down for action.
“I was pleased by how receptive the council has been,” he said in an interview as his second month ended. “I had hoped for that; but I wasn’t sure I was going to get it.”
•The third initiative grew logically out of the second: Miller had stated during his campaign that the merger of the “two Oneontas” – the town and city – into one municipality should be studied. Now, he acted on that.
Common Council unanimously endorsed the study. Regrettably, the Oneonta Town Board unanimously rejected it. But Miller is undeterred.
He has asked SUNY’s Center for Economic & Community Development to proceed with its study, and is willing to see how the facts play out.“If the economics aren’t persuasive, the conversation ends,” he said. “If the economics are persuasive, we have to figure out how to do it.”
Reagan disciple Grover Norquist said, even more famously, that he wanted to get government small enough “to drown it in a bathtub.”
Eventually, maybe. But after Mayor Miller’s first two months, most Oneontans must be saying, “Not yet.”