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.

Cobleskill’s Main Street at a Crossroads

After reading the recent front-page article in the Times-Journal which rattled off a litany of new businesses opening up in Downtown Cobleskill, my initial reaction was cautious optimism. I share with many a sense of hope for a potential rebirth of Main Street, but I also see that realizing such a vision will take more than a few new businesses opening up only to close down in six months.

Fortunately, many of the necessary ingredients for a renaissance are already in place. Downtown Cobleskill benefits from a large and devoted group of advocates who own and operate small businesses and are active in Cobleskill Partnership, Inc. This group of people has worked to cultivate a number of successful ongoing projects like Arts in the Park concerts, ArtWalk, and the crafts market, all of which have helped to re-make Downtown Cobleskill as desirable destination. It is also important to mention that Main Street dodged a big bullet this year when Lowe’s decided not to build a home improvement center next to Wal-Mart in the East End.

However, when it comes to its elected officials both on the Village Board of Trustees and the Town Council, Cobleskill seems to be at a distinct disadvantage. The Town Board under the leadership of Republicans Roger Cohn and Mike Montario before him, has aggressively supported any big box project or major developer to come down the pike, leaving Downtown pretty much an afterthought.

Meanwhile, the Village Board under Mayor Mike Sellers, despite once seeming to have Downtown’s best interests at heart, has seemingly lost its way. Beginning in 2005, the Village Board articulated, and claimed it would uphold, a policy of requiring annexation for developments outside the village that wanted village water and sewer service. However, the Board twice backed down on this policy under pressure from Lowe’s, Town of Cobleskill officials and county officials eager only for additional sales tax revenue and sadly uninterested in the affairs of Cobleskill’s Main Street.

Downtown Cobleskill just recently dodged another shiv to its back courtesy of Trustees Mark Galasso and Bill Gilmore who voted (but lost 3-2) to abandon a grant proposal for the Newberry Square building and instead support a grant for Stella McKenna’s proposed fitness center in the Town of Richmondville. Stella McKenna has plans to move her physical fitness facility out of its current location in the Village of Cobleskill to a new location on Route 7 in the Town of Richmondville. But McKenna needs a grant to make it happen and has been asking Village Board members to stop requesting Restore NY grant monies to rehabilitate the Newberry Square building because that project might reduce her chances of receiving the grant monies. Apparently, Galasso and Gilmore would rather use state grant money to help a taxpaying business leave the village and create another empty building than to pursue grant monies to rehabilitate an important piece of historic Downtown architecture. Does that make sense to you?

Clearly, with friends like these, Downtown Cobleskill doesn’t need enemies. But it could actually get worse. This year’s village election could see Bob LaPietra elected to the Board of Trustees. LaPietra is a slumlord who was just recently forced by state courts to vacate an illegally rented apartment in the Village after two years of dragging his feet and is also currently facing charges of ballot fraud. Yet despite all of this, he still has a decent shot at winning a seat on the board. Go figure!

If he does win, he and fellow conservative Mark Galasso will join forces with Mayor Sellers to push for a dissolution of the village, a move that will carve up Cobleskill’s infrastructure at the behest of county Republican Party hacks and every water-hungry developer that wants to build a strip mall from Wal-Mart to Howe Caverns.

In spite of the current leadership in both the town and village, Downtown Cobleskill does have a fighting chance. The recent spate of projects shows that there is interest. But nothing can be accomplished if town and village officials simply turn their backs on Main Street. Now is not the time to use scarce grant money to help businesses leave the village, and it is not time to enthrone slumlords who already believe they are above the law. Now is the time to look for ways to capitalize on the current momentum and help businesses stay open on Main Street. It will take leadership dedicated to this goal. With the exception of one or two people, the entire Village and Town Boards need to be replaced, but (for Christ’s sake!) not for the worse (as with LaPietra).

In the end, a successful revitalization of Main Street need not come from politicians, but no grassroots movement or group of enthusiastic business owners can succeed with the likes of Gilmore, Galasso and Mike Sellers pulling the rug out from under them. There’s enough of that coming from other levels of government.

Lying in the Weeds

An overgrown strip of tall grass in the village of Cobleskill’s East End has yielded a virtual bumper crop of material for critics of Village officials. The Times-Journal, eager to blow the slightest village misstep grossly out of proportion, has called it a “flashpoint” for the future direction of the Village. Letters to the editor offered a similar lament.

But as the weeds grew taller, Cobleskill supervisor Roger Cohn clearly saw an opportunity to make political hay out of the weedy median and gathered a few of his friends to help. In what was obviously a cheap political stunt, Cohn and several others decided to take matters into their own hands and remove the weeds themselves.

At the next village board meeting, trustees argued over who is actually responsible for the maintaining the median. Trustee Bill Gilmore angrily chastised Tom Fissell, the village’s highway superintendent, for not tending to the median. Trustee Mark Galasso cited a lack of planning on the part of the Village Board, and argued that officials should have budgeted money for median maintenance. Clearly, someone goofed.

Does that mean that there is a “leadership vacuum” in the village of Cobleskill as the Times-Journal editorialized (8-13-2008)? Not really, it just means that village officials made an honest mistake. What I find particularly troubling is the way in which the Cobleskill town supervisor opportunistically seized on this “honest mistake” for political expediency. Cohn could have easily called Mayor Sellers and the other trustees and asked them all to come out and weed the median. Instead, he called the Times-Journal to tell them of a photo opportunity.

This kind of realpolitik shows that Cobleskill town officials are interested not in working together with village officials but in embarrassing them. The problem is not with village officials, any random group of trustees is capable of making such an oversight. The problem is the mean-spirited hardball politics that people like Cohn are playing and that the Times-Journal is encouraging.

I’m glad that somebody took the time to weed out the tall grass. I just hope that the people of Cobleskill are able to weed out the naked political grandstanding.

Democracy Inaction

As expected it looks like Town of Richmondville voters decided to take out their anger on incumbent Supervisor Betsy Bernocco for her role in the recent wind turbine controversy. Unfortunately for Richmondville voters, the guy they just elected, John Barlow, has the exact same stance on the wind turbine issue as Bernocco. But people were frustrated and someone had to pay, I guess. To me, it looks like the voters traded an incumbent with an accomplished record and history of service for someone who barely campaigned for the job, and who didn’t even pledge to stop wind turbines from being developed. Way to go, Richmondville!

In the Village of Cobleskill, incumbent Rebecca Burgos-Thillet was trounced by former Mayor Bill Gilmore in a race for Village trustee. Naturally, this doesn’t bode well for Mayor Sellers and Deputy Mayor MacKay, both of whom seem to be bearing the brunt of criticism over some recent problems that seem to be beyond their control. Gilmore’s win –a huge 80%- will likely lead to his running for re-election as Mayor in 2009. Unfortunately, for Sellers and MacKay, the Times Journal has decided that anything from now until 2009 that happens to go wrong in the Village of Cobleskill will be blamed on Mayor Sellers’ youth and inexperience.

In the Cobleskill Supervisor’s race Republican Roger Cohn defeated Democrat Bob Strother. This is a disappointment. Hopefully, Cohn will not continue the entrenched position of outgoing Supervisor Mike Montario who essentially refused to consider any sharing of services with the Village unless they agreed to extend water and sewer services to Lowe’s. For two years, Montario held the process hostage because he apparently believed that the Town of Cobleskill was entitled to Village services. Strother had a lot of great ideas for improving participation, town-village negotiations, and helping Downtown. But the election of Roger Cohn seems like voters are saying they want more of the same. Hopefully I’m wrong.

A Do-Nothing Mayor?

In several recent editorials, the Times-Journal has taken Cobleskill Mayor Mike Sellers to the woodshed for his performance. After missing a Village board meeting due to a family crisis, The T-J demanded that Sellers “get a grip”. A week later, another editorial admonished voters not to expand terms from 2 to 4 years, because if a “do-nothing candidate” like Mayor Sellers settles in voters will have to wait twice as long to get rid of him.

Aside from the fact that these represent scurrilous ad hominem attacks that fall below the standards of professional journalism, they completely distort and misrepresent reality. First of all, the Sellers’ administration is not without accomplishments. Here are a few:

-Sellers refused to support extending Village water and sewer service to fuel sprawl outside the Village
-He and Sandy MacKay applied for and received a grant to study sharing services with the Town responsibly
-He reversed the skateboard ban
-He has helped increase the vitality of Downtown by creating a new crafts market and supporting other events

So far, that’s not so bad. I think it’s far easier to make up a simplistic narrative and stick with it than actually representing the situation fairly and accurately. The Times-Journal is just practicing bad journalism. Sellers has two more years to go before he finishes his first term, if he builds on his accomplishments and goes a few steps further, I think he could be responsible for turning around Downtown Cobleskill.

In the next two years, Sellers should get to work on making Downtown façade and streetscape improvements happen. He should also be taking a proactive role in getting the county to take control over the Guilford Mills plant from its current delinquent owner. One easy issue is bringing the Village Hall back downtown. This should have been done two years ago. Of course, negotiating with the Town to possibly create a combined town/village office building downtown would be a far better option. What about that long overdue skate-park?

Sellers has his work cut out for him. But if he accomplishes these things, Gilmore will have a very tough time getting elected Mayor again in 2009, if not, it’s going to be Gilmore part 2. Then you’ll wish we had a do-nothing mayor!