In a few instances, good information is not currently available and will require community surveys and new research to obtain it. The goal of understanding and acting on issues of governance within Erie County necessarily involves an ongoing dialogue and a series of deliberate action steps by a collaboration of stakeholders in the region. The region currently lacks a mechanism for centralizing and disseminating information and for deliberating issues of regional significance. Useful approaches are necessarily complex and involve an entire frontier of efficiencies, reforms, and collaborations. The tough question for the region is how to broker the inevitable tradeoffs between different goals of governance such as efficiency, equity, accountability, and political participation.
Effective governance is both an art and a science.
Further study on the interrelationships among sectors in the region is essential. Convene a regional forum early in 1996 for the purpose of presenting the analyses and findings of this report and to begin the process of deliberating governance concerns of regional significance. All sectors of the county should be represented at the forum and asked to join in an ongoing regional collaboration. The University at Buffalo, represented by President Greiner, would outline the commitment of UB to this effort and propose a series of follow-up steps as indicated below. Although this first forum would be focused upon Erie County as a pilot effort, representatives of other Western New York counties would be invited with the goal of expanding the collaboration to a broader regional basis.