Grains of Salt (v44): The State of the County

New County Executive Ryan McMahon gave his first State of the County address at the end of last month, offering successes from the county and various departments, as well as outlining a fairly moderate vision for the future.

You can watch the speech here, with closed captioning that, let's just say, added an unintentional air of comedy.

The successes included a budget surplus, increased sales tax receipts, significant economic impact from the amphitheater, and increased revenue from the Turning Stone gambling compact payments. Property taxes are lower than ever, and there's a lot more collaboration across all jurisdictions, including with the City of Syracuse.

Here are a few of the initiatives he mentioned:

• Implementing a ThinkDifferently plan here. Developed by Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro, a ThinkDifferently program ensures residents with special needs - those on the autism spectrum, or who have mental health issues or physical disabilities, are given appropriate support and services. There's a new position for a Deputy Commissioner of Disability Services included here, too. 
• Creating a Chief Diversity Officer; expanding minority representation in the county workforce to 20% by 2022, and recruiting county workers from the poorest zip codes in the city, the suburbs, and rural areas.  
• Promoting a bill that will make all plot and burial services for veterans and eligible dependents free at the Onondaga County Veterans Cemetery.
• consolidating all of the waste water infrastructure under the county, so that we can "fix the pipes once for the next 100 years" instead of making incremental repairs over and over and over for the next 100 years.

The main points of his address centered on what he calls the PIE agenda, focusing on poverty, infrastructure, and economic development. Let's look at some of the details.

Poverty, McMahon said, is the "moral challenge of our time" and he made sure to point out that it's not just a Syracuse issue; we have, he said, extreme rural and suburban poverty as well.  The primary goal here is to make poverty a "temporary moment in time and not a way of life."

We have to address this, he said, on several fronts: ending generational poverty; health; housing; early childhood programs; transportation; workforce development, and education, including:

• the county's Jobs Plus program, and its Help Young People Excel (HYPE) program, which help folks receiving welfare benefits move towards employment 
• anew WIC office at the former Nojaim's Grocery Store on the Near West Side, and the creation of 52 on-site mental health clinics in schools across the county
• additional funding for lead paint abatement, even as we've seen a 35% decline in elevated lead blood tests overall; 
• funding programs designed to help increase the number of kids who are kindergarten ready, currently only 38% county-wide;
• finding ways to improve public transportation, and support for Centro's call for additional funding to continue meeting public transportation needs here; and
• improving upon the work of the  County's Drug Task Force, which has been successful in helping reduce opioid deaths in the county by 41%.

Much of the talk focused on collaboration with Syracuse, For example, they're looking at co-location of county and city economic development teams in the old Carnegie building. This started under the previous administrations but fell apart. Both Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh and McMahon support this and showing that "we are open for business."

A huge collaborative effort involves increasing development and opportunity at the south end of downtown, including finally getting covered walkways from the Convention Center to the Marriott Downtown Syracuse. That's been a dream of convention and tourism groups since the Convention Center project was first envisioned back in the 1980s.  

But what I thought was one of the most interesting moments of his speech was the reaction to that last piece. When McMahon mentioned creating a real Convention Center District, including expanding the Tech Garden and redoing the AXA plaza, there was pretty widespread applause. He followed up with this related note, since the Convention Center District also includes the new city/county STEAM school and other investment projects:

Our past investments in our county facilities and tourism and in our innovation ecosystem are paying huge dividends for our region. It's time we double down on these growth industries. Let's create a physical anchor point for the Syracuse Surge and drive jobs and investment southward into points of our county that need our support and investment the most.

As he finished that last sentence, it sounded like maybe two people applauded; I listened to that part a couple of times and the silence was almost palpable. While city leaders, including Mayor Walsh and Common Councilor Joe Driscoll, appreciated the many references to city-county collaboration, it seemed the audience either missed what McMahon said at the end, or they sat on their hands on purpose.

This is the perpetual challenge our leaders face - the us vs. them mentality that crops up when we get into nitty-gritty discussions of how to to address issues that impact the entire region - and that's pretty much every issue that impacts the city of Syracuse, frankly.

It's playing out almost daily on the I-81 project, where most in the suburbs favor either a more disruptive viaduct or some version of a tunnel, while most in the city tend to favor a community grid. McMahon did not mention this in his speech, but he's on record for a grid/tunnel hybrid, while Walsh and Driscoll are both vocal supporters of the latter.

We saw it years ago, too, when the Consensus roadmap to consolidation of our way-too-many jurisdictions was launched. (I'll have to check to see whatever happened with that initiative.)

McMahon and Walsh, the Common Council and the County Legislature, and all of us who live in the county, have to find a way to come to terms on how best we can all move forward together.