From his office window, Michael Hein can see a 450-year-old church in downtown Kingston where George Washington once spoke.

A year into his job as the first Ulster County executive, Hein said he feels some communion with the first president.

“We’re a very new form of government, too,” Hein said. “We understand that our role is not that well defined.”

Hein was sworn in to the newly created office last January as part of the first major change in the structure of a New York county government in decades.

Before the switch, Ulster—an area the size of Rhode Island with 181,000 people and a $350 million operating budget—had been governed by 33 part-time legislators.

With a single person now in charge, Hein said, residents now know who is accountable for the county’s successes and failures, pressing the idea that an executive is better able to look out for a broader set of economic and fiscal interests than 33 individuals representing different constituencies.

“In the past, nobody was representing everybody,” he said.

In the mid-1990s, Ulster County’s economy was devastated by the departure of IBM. Over the next decade, the county legislature was slow in helping build a new economy, Hein said. Proposals to give companies tax breaks languished for months in legislative committees.

Critics also complained that legislators did not adequately oversee county departments. In 2004, after the construction of a jail ran $30 million over budget—prompting a 35-percent property tax increase—public outrage finally induced the county legislature to form a charter commission with the mission of creating a county executive’s office.

Opponents, though, said it would bloat government and concentrate too much power in one person.

In 2006, voters narrowly passed a ballot referendum presented by the commission, creating a county executive and county comptroller offices. The changes went into effect after a two-year transition period.

The change to the Ulster government structure was not the only consequence of the property tax increase. During the debate over the hike in 2004, Hein was working for the county treasurer’s office. A registered Republican at the time, Hein recommended to the Republican-controlled county legislature that Ulster raise the taxes instead of tapping into funds from a tobacco settlement.

For the Republicans, the move was a disaster, causing them to lose their majority. But Hein landed on his feet: he switched parties, and the now-Democratically controlled Ulster legislature appointed him county administrator, a position charged with managing county government functions.

“He pretty much sold us down the river—and I’ve told him so,” said Frank Felicello, vice-chair of the Republican conference.

Despite these personal and political disputes, Hein was able to parlay his new job into a successful campaign for the new top job in the 2008 election.

In his first year as county executive, Hein got competing local ski resorts to begin a joint marketing campaign together, which he says contributed to the Catskills’ most profitable ski season ever. He put together a package of incentives to keep a local dairy in town. A former banker, Hein assembled a consortium of local lenders for small businesses that could not have otherwise qualified for loans from bigger banks. From consolidating the process for plowing the county’s streets to cleaning up the hiring at a dysfunctional county health department, Hein has quickly taken advantage of his and the county’s new executive authority.

Gerald Benjamin, who co-chaired the charter commission that created Hein’s new job, said the new office had worked mostly as planned.

“He was unlucky to become county executive during the middle of a fiscal crisis, but I do think he has brought order and accountability to county government,” Benjamin said.

Still, some of Hein’s political opponents question whether the charter Benjamin helped write has given the county executive too much power. Legal disputes have arisen about the scope of Hein’s power, said Beatrice Havranek, the Ulster County attorney.

Hein’s management style has also become a point of dispute: he has not allowed department heads to testify in front of county legislature without his approval, a tactic Republicans say is indicative of an overall lack of transparency from the administration.

They also complain that the county has become top-heavy administratively: 14 lower-paying jobs on the county payroll were eliminated to pay for eight new highly paid, charter-mandated employees. Hein also added two additional non-mandated employees, forcing salary reductions for other employees to pay for these.

For all the complaints, Hein has been able to galvanize support—though the new charter gives Hein a line-item veto that the Legislature can only override with a two-thirds vote, the Democrats in the legislature did not veto any of his bills last year.

This, however, has given local Republicans fodder to claim Hein rams through policies unchecked.

“I just think he’s moving a little too fast and trying to accomplish too much in too little time,” Felicello said.

Last November, fortunes turned for the Republicans, who picked up four seats and retook the majority in the county legislature. New chairman Frederick Wadnola called these victories a repudiation of Hein’s policies, though he admitted that the concept of having a county executive remains popular.

“The charter will be good when we have to separate branches of government,” he said. “We should be in charge of the policymaking, and they should be in charge of the day-to-day operations.”

The turmoil of transition in Ulster has not so far been enough to scare off neighboring Sullivan County from trying a similar experiment in government restructuring through creating a county executive.

Sean Rieber, who is chairing a committee looking into a possible Sullivan charter change, said committee members recently met with Hein and came away impressed by the progress Ulster has made under him, though the Republican concerns with his performance also made an impression.

In response to the ups and the downs, Rieber predicted that if Sullivan County does create an executive, the position would likely come with more specifically defined duties than those provided by the Ulster charter, while still preserving clear executive authority.

“Executives think one way and legislators think another, and believe there should be a very strong system of checks and balances,” Rieber said. “But at the end of the day, the executive needs to have the power to do things.”

Across the state, only 16 of 62 counties have executives (the five counties in New York City function under a different structure, with borough presidents and a strong mayor), with the others having only an administrator or a board of supervisors.

Hein is not expecting many of the remaining ones to follow his county’s lead, no matter his own successes in Ulster.

“This is not a common thing,” he said. “For it to happen, ultimately, a government body has to decide to take authority away from itself.”