The Times-Journal Misses Mayor Sellers

About halfway through the Times-Journal’s ridiculous editorial entitled “In Absentia” I realized it was going to be one of those annoying editorials that made me want to call up Jim Poole just to tell him to shut the hell up. If you want to take a public official to task for not showing up at Board meetings and not responding to citizen’s calls, I can understand that. But in this case, the Times-Journal goes way overboard. In the editorial, Mayor Sellers is criticized not for his poor attendance at Village meetings, but at, get this, memorial day ceremonies! He is also skewered for not showing up regularly enough at the annual meetings of Cobleskill Partnership Incorporated, a voluntary organization of which Mr. Sellers is a committee member.

Why Mr. Sellers’ attendance is so absolutely crucial and essential at these annual CPI meetings? Oh yes, according to the Times-Journal it was an “opportunity to schmooze with local entrepreneurs”. Hey, good schmoozing opportunities don’t come along every day.

Sellers is also criticized for not being involved with the “remodeling” of the corner of Main and Division St. But if I remember correctly, there were plenty of people who “had a hand” in the project already. I seem to remember seeing all their faces in the obligatory Times-Journal photo-op a few weeks ago. Another missed schmoozing opportunity, I guess. If anyone can think of any more events in the village that the Mayor has missed please contact Mr. Poole at once.

Then the editorial informs us that Mr. Sellers is on vacation in Peru, a revelation most likely greeted with the loudest collective ‘who gives a shit?’ in recent memory. I am still scratching my head trying to figure out exactly how this constitutes news. I know that the Times-Journal loves to bash Sellers as the “no-show mayor” and I know that its hard to stray from the established talking point, but this is grasping at straws.

If anyone reading this has any contact with Sellers, be sure and remind him to send Jim Poole a postcard from Machu Picchu.

LaPietra’s Intolerable Acts

One wonders if getting slammed with a $25 dollar fee for complaining that your slumlord won’t fix the furnace is what the Boston colonists had in mind when they dumped all that tea into the harbor. Probably not, but that’s okay. We’ll just add irony to the list of things Village Trustee Bob LaPietra, who ran on his own ‘Tea Party’ line, doesn’t quite get.

At February’s first Village Board meeting, Cobleskill’s most patriotic slumlord attempted to strike a blow for deadbeat property owners everywhere when he introduced a motion to charge village residents a $25 dollar fee for reporting codes violations. Shameless, I know. But if that wasn’t bad enough he also made a motion to Nelli Mooney, head of the Department of Planning, Environment and Codes with two part-timers. If passed, these two measures would have discouraged cash-strapped tenants from filing complaints and removed an experienced village employee, effectively dismantling the codes office in the process. The message to village employees would have been simple: if you do your job by protecting village residents from people like me, I’ll have your job.

Though Trustee Mark Galasso supported LaPietra’s measures, they were blocked by the other three members of the Village Board (Linda Holmes, Sandy MacKay and Mayor Michael Sellers).

LaPietra’s abuse of power was so blatant that even the Times-Journal, which is usually supportive of LaPietra, had to take a step back and wonder what the hell this guy was thinking. They correctly point to LaPietra’s long and sordid history of flouting local zoning ordinances and building codes. As recently as several months ago, LaPietra was ordered by a state court to remove residents from the upper floor of a commercial building that was out of compliance with both the local zoning ordinance and the state building code.

The Times-Journal said LaPietra’s proposals “raised alarm bells”, and that’s reassuring. However, the editorial extended LaPietra little more than a slap on the wrist for his naked attempt to gut the codes office. They also completely failed to hold Trustee Mark Galasso accountable for his support of that attempt. This raises the question, far more urgent and critical than the Times-Journal’s “alarm bells”, of whether or not LaPietra and Galasso will be held accountable at all. LaPietra casually violates the law and then goes after the jobs of the people who attempted to stop him. Meanwhile, Mark Galasso, whose Daddy handed him a multi-million dollar highway construction company, wants to charge Schoharie County’s working poor $25 to file a complaint against their slumlord. It’s obvious that these two men have no shame. Jim Poole's ears are ringing, but where's the outrage?

Were I LaPietra or Galasso I would seriously consider holding off on the whole American Revolution theme as now would probably not be a good time for them to remind people of that whole tarring and feathering thing we used to do.

Experience and Issues Matter in Richmondville, Finally

While Reunion Power has been busy measuring the wind speeds up on Warnerville Hill, there has been more than enough hot air blowing around Richmondville Town Board meetings to power most of the Eastern seaboard. I’m sure most of you have seen them, if not live and in person than surely on Schopeg. Every month the same cast of characters shows up in force to point their fingers and stomp their feet.

However, Richmondville residents accustomed to getting what they want via temper tantrum were surely quite displeased when former supervisor Betsy Bernocco was appointed to the Town Board to fill out the term of Larry Zaba. Could Bernocco’s appointment be a sign that Richmondville’s elected officials are finally growing a pair? Could this mean that they are finally realizing that the angry NIMBY’s who stalk Town Board meetings are not representative of the town as a whole?

I sure hope so, because it’s about time this community sobered up when it comes to wind power. For over two years the discussion has been dominated by a small but vocal group bitterly opposed to wind power who have infected every aspect of the process with unfounded fear and hysteria. Last Fall, the Town Board inexplicably voted to adopt an onerously high wind turbine setback of 1500 feet, a figure arguably adopted only to placate Reunion Power’s critics, often the loudest and rudest voices in the room. God only knows what kind of lop-sided and biased information the committee used to determine those setback recommendations. Schoharie Valley Watch themselves have criticized the supposed secrecy of the setback committee. I too, would like there to be an open process and I would like to know just how the committee came up with a setback figure of 1500 feet when dozens of nearby communities with comparable population densities and topographies have adopted considerably lower setbacks.

While Bernocco’s appointment has been criticized by the usual chronic complainers, her experience and long record of service to the town and village of Richmondville make her an asset to the Town Board. As the Town attempts to move forward on the wind law and dozens of other issues objectively and intelligently it is crucial that they act as representatives for all town residents, not just the handful of loudmouths who show up at Board meetings every month to bitch and moan.

PAYT a mixed bag

Pay-as-you-throw garbage collection is back on the table in the Village of Cobleskill as trustees grapple with the rising costs of trash removal. While the temptation to save costs by removing trash collection from the Village budget is a powerful incentive, the new system being proposed could have village residents throwing away their money more than anything else.

Initially, PAYT emerged as a brainchild of the libertarian far right as a way to rationalize waste disposal by individualizing costs and benefits. In a twist of irony, the idea was later adopted by some environmentalists who believe that PAYT incentivizes recycling and reduces waste streams. Ithaca, NY of all places uses PAYT for trash removal, precisely because it has been so successfully re-packaged as a green reform.

However, the other side to PAYT is that the system radically shifts the burden of paying for trash removal from a somewhat more progressive system where the costs are built in to your property tax bill to a far more regressive system where the poorest of the poor pay the same rates as the richest of the rich. This regressive system can be compounded for poor households that happen to be larger in size and who will therefore tend to generate more waste. The bottom line is that under PAYT, the poor pay more for trash removal as their fees constitute a higher portion of their household income.

Admittedly, PAYT is a system that has generated a considerable amount of “curb appeal” as an innovative way to privatize a costly municipal service AND at the same increase recycling. However, PAYT often makes trash removal unnecessarily complicated, encourages illegal dumping and regressively shifts the burden of trash removal costs to the poor. With these obvious positives and negatives, PAYT is clearly a mixed bag. Any municipality interested in adopting a PAYT system should look carefully at these positives and negatives and weigh them against each other. In Cobleskill, that doesn’t appear to be happening. Instead, village trustees seem to be looking to pawn off an expensive service on village residents with little regard for the economic impact it will have.