Guest Column: Legislator Kathy Konst

A good deal of our attention has been happily distracted from March Mayhem to March Madness.  Thank goodness for basketball.  It temporarily shifts our focus away from the mayhem on local roads and bridges once the spring thaw is in full swing.

Winter’s fury and the relentless beating our infrastructure has taken from ice, snow, sand, salt and heavy equipment are obvious to anyone who ventures out before the patching crews have been out in full force.

The craters in the roads and the crumbling shoulders have caused even the most cautious drivers to swerve or slam on their brakes.  Neither option is good for our vehicles.  But for those who’ve gone through season after season of Buffalo winters followed by spring auto repair sticker shock, it’s financially draining.

Potholes that devour tires and rims, craters that make a Sunday drive more like a children’s bounce house ? all combine to put a dent in our family budgets when the tire replacements, new shock absorbers, broken tie-rods and front-end alignment invoices pile up.

This perennial white-knuckle journey is bad enough under normal circumstances.  What makes this year’s experience even more jarring is that Erie County has not borrowed for its 2007 or 2008 capital program yet, due to an impasse between the Erie County Fiscal Stability Authority (ECFSA) and the Erie County Administration.

The County Legislature each year passes a capital program whose first priority is public safety.   Despite the fact that more than $80 million in projects have been approved by the County Legislature and are in the pipeline, 2 ½ years have gone by with no resolution to the borrowing logjam.

On March 26, the Erie County Legislature overwhelmingly and on a bipartisan basis approved a home rule request for passage of Assembly Bill 6083 and Senate Bill 3161 to allow Erie County to borrow without the approval of the ECFSA.  Unlike most public policy discussions, this one is notable for its agreement among all of the policymakers in Erie County Government ? the Executive, the Legislature and the Comptroller.

It stands to reason that the County Comptroller, under whose tenure Erie County has enjoyed three separate upgrades by three different credit rating organizations, should be the one who goes to the bond market, following authorization by the County Legislature, which we have given him time and again.

However, the taxpayers of Erie County continue to be haunted by the ghost of Christmas, or should I say Crisis, Past.  The specter of the Erie County Fiscal Stability Authority and its non-elected members continue to hold hostage to our desperately needed infrastructure improvements and strangle our family budgets with excessive car repair bills.

Please voice your support for passage of A.6083/S.3161 so we can attend to our roads and bridges we all share, and help our individual family budgets at the same time.