Kevin Gaughan
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Kevin P. Gaughan is an attorney and an advocate of government reform, in particular for the establishment of regional government and regional consciousness within the Buffalo-Niagara region which encompasses the cities of Buffalo, New York and Niagara Falls, New York and their suburbs and surrounding rural areas. Gaughan is most recognized as a national leader in regionalism for a series of conferences which he organized at the Chautauqua Institution in 1997. The following year he was named the citizen of the year by the Buffalo News, and in 2001 he became the yougest recipient of the Red Jacket Medal, awarded by the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society for civic leadership.
Gaughan is the son of a judge who acted as an advisor to several presidents including Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. The family relationship continued when Kevin became college roommate to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while undergraduates at Harvard University. Later, Gaughan studied law at Georgetown University and international relations at the London School of Economics. He opened a law office in the Buffalo suburb of Hamburg, New York, and in 2005 ran for the mayorality of Buffalo losing the Democratic primary to New York State Senate and eventual mayor Byron Brown. In early 2006 he launched an abortive campaign for the senate seat vacated by Brown, but dropped out of the race at the urging of local Democratic Party leaders who backed another candidate.
Gaughan is the author of At First Light: Strengthening Buffalo Niagara in the New Century which was published by the Canisius College Press in 2003. The book is a collection of speeches and short essays by Gaughan on such subjects as regionalism, government reform, race relations, US and local history, and patriotism. The forward to this book was written by his former roommate RFK Jr. Additionally, Gaughan is on the Advisory Committee for SUNY Buffalo's Institute for Local Governance.
In late 2006, he released the results of a study entitled The Cost which detailed the amount paid to elected officials at various levels of government in the the Buffalo-Niagara region. He compared this to other regions and found that Buffalo-Niagara had significantly more paid elected officials than other regions on both absolute and per capita measures. Additionally, a high number of small towns replicating services- such as police, highway maintianance and parks departments lead to a higher number of civil-service government employees. Gaughan uses these numbers to support his thesis that entire layers of government should be done away with in Buffalo-Niagara.
