Editor’s note: This editorial appeared in the OBSERVER on Jan. 14, 1977. It highlights something this newspaper continues to push: more consolidation of local government.

Friends of Dunkirk Mayor Gilbert Snyder and Sheridan Supervisor Wayne Luce have expressed some umbrage because we referred to their disagreement over Sheridan’s taxes on the Dunkirk Municipal Airport as an “argument.”

One might almost think there was something wrong about arguing. If there is, then the whole legal profession is culpable and the democratic system is flawed, because it is based on the expression of opposing points of view and, if possible, the reconciliation and compromise of those opinions. The points of view must be expressed before anything can be done about dealing with the differences. Anyone in a position of civic responsibility would be remiss if he failed to be a spokesman in behalf of his constituency. That’s among the things he is being paid to do.

To dispute the use of the word “argument,” perhaps in favor of such euphemisms as “discussion” or “debate,” or “contention,” is to avoid the point of the editorial, which was that as long as local government remains fragmented, all of its parts spend more time protecting their individual interests than they do in solving their common problems and serving their common interests.

This may have been all right in the 19th century, when the local jurisdictions were laid out. In those days there were not large numbers of common problems. People dug their own wells and privies, seldom needed to cross a town or city line to shop or reach places of employment and certainly didn’t envisage an air strip in each political subdivision.

Today, practically everything is changed EXCEPT the political boundaries. Most of the problems with which we are confronted stem from the failure of the obsolete political subdivisions to accurately represent the way people now live and the larger community in which they do it.

We are not saying that either Mr. Snyder or Mr. Luce is right or wrong in the matter of airport taxes. What we  are saying is that if the government of the larger?Dunkirk-Fredonia-Sheridan-Pomfret community was properly organized, the point wouldn’t even arise.

As we said in a somewhat different way, let’s get serious about some sort of regional governance. Let’s cure the fragmentation which puts political leaders in a “can’t win” position of competing for what they consider best for their narrow constituencies. Let’s find a way to have some body in charge instead of being like the fabled general who “mounted his horse and rode off in all directions.”

By all means, let’s have arguments of all sorts and degrees of intensity about the best way to accomplish it.