Two years ago, Chautauqua County chose not to make any changes to its County-Wide Shared Services Initiative.

We disagreed with the decision at the time, in part because the need to find ways to streamline the provision of government services should never rest. We couldn’t agree more, then, with Wendel’s inclusion of further mergers, consolidations and shared services as part of his 2025 State of the County address.

Wendel said as part of his 2026 budget he wants to build a financial resource and develop a strategy regarding local municipal mergers, consolidations and shared services. Wendel believes this will both lower taxes and improve services.

“The purpose of this fund would be to reduce redundancies, thus leading to significant cost savings by streamlining operations and enhancing and eliminating duplicate services,” he said.

Of course, the devil will be in the details, and we won’t see those details until the fall. But the fact the executive is taking leadership on one of the critical issues facing Chautauqua County is welcome news. Shared services have increased throughout the years, often in ways that go unnoticed by the average county resident through things like sharing highway equipment or property assessors. Schools have stepped up efforts to share positions as qualified employees for those jobs – like transportation directors – have become more difficult to find.

The question before us now, then, isn’t if we should further pursue shared services, mergers and consolidations but how big a swing to take. Police consolidation makes a lot of sense financially in both the north and south county, but has been a tough nut to crack over the past 30 years. Work undertaken by towns over the past few years, brought on by necessity, to merge town courts indicates that further court consolidation may make sense to be part of Wendel’s strategy. The merger of four rural fire departments could be an interesting model in the protection of fire and EMS services in rural areas – though we have already seen opposition to further mergers in the north county. And, of course, there’s the complete elimination of some of our government units.

As we said last January, Chautauqua County would probably look a lot different if we were designing local government from scratch. We can’t just take a big bottle of whiteout to the municipal maps we’ve had for the past 150 years, but we can use a bigger eraser than we’ve used over the past few years to erase some of these man-made lines.

We look forward to seeing Wendel’s plan to do just that.