Westchester: Land of Much Wampum

Although I have lived in Westchester County since 1977, that makes thirty-two years of not knowing what the Westchester County government actually does. I have some understanding of village, town and school district operations, but the county government is a mystery. Today I want to talk about just four of the responsibilities I know belong to Andy Spano and his team. Later I can discuss other items as they come across my radar screen. This year's county budget is $1,780,000,000. Yes, that is $1.78 billion. That is a lot of wampum even for Westchester.

We do have very good libraries in Westchester. They even have very polite system that calls my home to let me know that books we have reserved are actually at the library. I take that back, the system is efficient, but as hard as I have tried, I find it impossible to engage the library caller in a conversation. Perhaps they get paid by the number of calls they make and chatting with me is just like taking money from their pockets. "Mr. Holt, Charles your copy of Blue Beard is now at the Croton-on-Hudson Library. It will remain at the library until June 13, 2008. Please pick up your books." This poor woman sounds as though she has swallowed a frog or has a hangover that will not go away. Every word is a struggle for her. I often feel compelled to ask her how she is doing, but I only get silence at the far end of the line.

Now the libraries in Westchester are city, town and village responsibilities. My guess is that these hung over phone callers with their garbled voices are the county employees or autobots created by the county. They cannot be paying them a significant share of the $1.78 billion otherwise they would sound much more joyful on the phone..

Every few months we do receive a rather large mailing from the county. Enclosed in those packages is the latest rendition of the evacuation plan in case of an accident at the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant. At Dickerson Pond we are about five miles as the crow (or neutrons) flies. We live on a narrow two lane road with nothing by double yellow lines for miles. There are also two schools within a half mile of our location. Now as I read through the plan there are a couple of key premises to it working well. The first is that we will have alarms that work and that we know what to do when the alarms go off, fat chance. Next is that the people assigned to drive the evacuation buses will immediately rush from where they are to our area to collect the school children and residents. They will hear that there is a nuclear accident at Indian Point and jump in their bus/car to drive toward the nuclear incident, right. Now since the plan makes the roads in our area all one way, leading away from Indian Point the bus drivers and their vehicles must drive against the traffic. I can imagine how easy it will be for the assigned bus drivers to drive in towards the panicky evacuees and make to their assigned starting point, assuming anyone will want to drive toward Indian Point. That makes about as much sense as the evacuation plan's recommendation for parents not to drive to the school where their children are to pick the students up, but to abandon their children and leave on the evacuation route with the idea of rendezvousing with their children in some ill defined location. Oh that is going to work well.

There are over twenty million people living within fifty miles of Indian Point. Public Safety employees cannot get seventy thousand fans out of Giant Stadium after a football game in any semblance of order, and these same people expect twenty million people to evacuate in a prescribed fashion. I hope we are not spending much money on these plans. When I hear the sirens, I am packing up the contents of my wine refrigerators and heading to the condo basement area.

We do have Westchester County police. One of their big responsibilities is patrolling the Westchester County Parkways. These roadways are another county responsibility. Most of these parkways are aptly named after moving bodies of water. Aptly because any time there is more than a rain shower these parkways are fully submerged. The primary responsibility of the county police seems to be barricading the parkways and redirecting traffic to the secondary roads least capable of handling the traffic. We have state, city, town, village and NYC Water Department police forces in the county. There does not seem to be a police shortage in Westchester, but who am I to know.

I know I just skimmed over these areas of service and perhaps some other day I will give each the full attention it deserves. So much to say -- so easy to ramble on.