Highly Taxed and Fed Up, Rebels Won’t Just Eat Cake NYTimes.com

GREENBURGH

SOUNDING OFF Paul Feiner and Councilwoman Joan Gronowski.

THE revolution has begun.

On June 2 — remember that date; you may someday celebrate it with fireworks and barbecues — 70 sons and daughters of Westchester gathered in Town Hall here to overthrow the county government.

These Minutemen wannabes were not violent sorts, broke no laws we know of. The most aggressive thing they did was come up with a funny name for a Web site they plan to create: Wastechester.org.

But make no bones about it: They did vigorously and harmoniously call for the abolition of county government. One man in the crowd even shouted like Peter Finch in “Network”: “We can’t take it anymore!” Others denounced the county government as extravagant, duplicative and riddled with patronage and boondoggles.

“Two hundred and thirty years ago, the country went to war over taxation without representation,” declared Sherwood Chorost, a former trustee of Tarrytown. “Now the phrase is overtaxation with overrepresentation.”

The Patrick Henrys or Vladimir Lenins or Robespierres — choose your revolution — were Paul Feiner, the idea-generating supervisor of Greenburgh, and Joan Gronowski, a freshman councilwoman from Yonkers. They informed the crowd of middle-aged and older people, including some of Westchester’s most seasoned gadflies, that the county government costs almost .8 billion a year, mostly paid by homeowners.

Many taxpayers scarcely know what the government does, and others would not be surprised to learn that many functions could be transplanted to state and municipal governments that already perform similar functions — like maintaining parks and dispensing welfare. The result of all that payroll padding, said several speakers, is that Westchester residents increasingly can’t afford taxes on their homes.

The insurgents’ case has been bolstered by recent disclosures that some members of the 17-member County Board of Legislators have spent taxpayer dollars on flights and hotels for conferences in getaways like Hawaii, on whopping cellphone bills and even on software for Hollywood scriptwriting and drawing Japanese cartoons. Mr. Feiner recalled that when he was a legislator two decades ago, the Legislature did not have a single aide; now it has 40, and one earns 0,000.

The county bureaucracy does do some essentials. It runs a regional airport that accommodates flights to Chicago and Orlando, Fla., a bus system for 55,000 daily riders, 50 parks, a jail, a forensics unit needed by local police departments, academies to train police officers and firefighters and a social services program that funnels temporary payments to distressed families. Seventy-five percent of the county’s spending is on matters required by the state or federal government.

But people at this Boston Tea Party argued that necessary functions have encrusted themselves with layers of commissioners and deputy commissioners whose jobs could be done by state bureaucrats. Does Westchester need a human rights commission when other governments already have them? Does it need a consumer protection agency when the state has one? Does it need a bomb squad to answer crank calls by students trying to get out of exams? For that matter, the rebels asked, how necessary is County Executive Andrew Spano, or at least, how necessary is it that he travel to China saying he is trying to attract business?

“I find that the more you give anybody in government, the more they want,” Councilwoman Gronowski told the crowd. “Give ’em a car and they want a cellphone. They get used to that and develop a sense of entitlement.”

When told of the rebels’ demands, Susan Tolchin, Mr. Spano’s chief adviser, unsheathed a dagger of her own. She wondered if Mr. Feiner was leading the abolition bandwagon to “deflect the fact that he’s had to raise taxes in Greenburgh by 21 percent.”

Asked about that, Mr. Feiner retorted that he has been advocating abolition of county government since 1990 and that he increased taxes only after two years of zero increases.

Taxes, Ms. Tolchin insisted, were at the root of the grievances, but county taxes, she said, account for only 20 percent of a homeowner’s bill, while school taxes exceed 60 percent. And the county, she argued, has no choice but to perform required functions like paying 50 percent of the Medicaid bill — a tab of 5 million annually.

At the June 2 meeting, speakers extolled Connecticut for ending county government in 1960 and Massachusetts for giving county governments the option to abolish themselves, which many did in the 1990s. Two of the eight committees the rebels formed will study how abolition in those states has worked out. Other committees will look into what state legislation would be required for abolition and develop ways to market and finance the overthrow campaign.

Those who study revolutions might point out that revolutionary committees have a way of becoming longstanding and lethal. The French Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety ordered thousands of executions by guillotine.

And there was a shrewd warning by Dennis Robertson, a former Yonkers councilman, about a backlash from politicians who would lose their jobs.

“If they see this is a revolution, what are they going to do?” he asked.

Ultimately, abolition might turn out to be a rallying cry for something a good deal less drastic — cuts in county spending — a theory Mr. Feiner concedes.

“When times are good and the economy is good and people can afford living here, if you have an extra layer of government, nobody’s paying attention,” Mr. Feiner said. “But now people tell me they can’t afford their taxes, so our goal is to eliminate layers of government fat.”

E-mail: joeberg@nytimes.com

E-mail: joeberg@nytimes.com