It can be depressing, watching as this community stays stuck in the mud. Every once in a while, we seem ready for change, and then....

Last week, the Democrat and Chronicle dusted the cobwebs off of a key idea for change: consolidating at least some of the ridiculous number of local governments in this region. But the way the daily framed the issue pretty much doomed any meaningful discussion.

The D&C, WXXI, and WDKX commissioned a poll on a variety of local issues. Among the questions was this: "If it meant a substantial savings in your tax bill, would you support or oppose merging some layers of county, municipal, and township governments?"

Nearly three-quarters of the people polled favored consolidation.

"What more do Brooks and Duffy want before acting?" scolded the D&C. "A two-by-four to hit them over the head?"

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in Monroe County, merging some layers of government won't save a lot of money. If that's your only argument for consolidation, forget it.

This newspaper has pushed for consolidation for almost all of its 37-year history. But I learned the fallacy of the money argument in the 1980's, during the campaign for metro police. A combined force would cost more, not less. The reason: city police were paid more than sheriff's deputies and town police, and we'd have to bring everybody up to the city's pay scale.

I tested the money-saving argument last week on two people who have studied consolidation extensively: RIT professor John Klofas and Center for Governmental Research president Kent Gardner.

"I don't think there are real clear examples where consolidation saves a lot of money," says Gardner.

Money, says Klofas, is a red herring.

In some cases, you could save a little bit of money, says Gardner. If you consolidated the police force of a village and a town, you might eliminate a couple of positions. And you could save money by combining fire departments. Trucks and firehouses are expensive. In other cases, the savings at one level simply become an expense for the next level.

There are plenty of good reasons to consolidate. Gardner says services would probably be better managed and more efficiently distributed. "If we consolidated town police departments into the sheriff's office," suggests Gardner, "the manpower probably would be the same, but we would have a more rational allocation."

If a county assessor's office handled assessments for all the municipalities, he says, taxpayers might actually pay more, because assessments would be done more professionally. But it would eliminate the inequities of the current system, in which assessments can differ unfairly block to block and sometimes within a block.

There are costs to the way we do things now. Klofas points to the costs of rebuilding and duplicating roads, libraries, sewers, schools, recreation centers. Those are costs we bear because our population has spread out but hasn't grown. The people who moved to the outer suburbs want those services, and so do those of us who have stayed put.

If you want to talk about costs, says Klofas, "look at the decline in the urban core."

And, he asks: "What does it cost you to have a portion of your population that doesn't make it into your work force?"

Then there are the issues of fairness and equity: availability of affordable housing, the segregation of our schools.

These, though, are bleeding-heart-liberal reasons for consolidation. In this community, they don't sell well. Neither do the good-government reasons.

And that, says Gardner, is why we always come back to the money argument. "Everybody starts the conversation there," he says. "And then, the conversation ends there."

"This remains the most important issue for this community," says Klofas. But we haven't been ready to deal with it in more than a quarter of a century. And I'll be surprised if we're ready to deal with it now.