There, is however a new sheriff on this scene. The ex-banker executive is very much a bottom-line guy, as he has repeatedly demonstrated. And county garbage disposal is very much a bottom-line issue. For now, the executive will allow the legislature to debate, disagree and muddle, before stepping in with a well-conceived plan, perhaps contingent on next year’s budget passage.
Chips ahoy
Supervisor Chipman is a rare public official. He speaks at almost every county legislature meeting. Oftentimes he talks about town-county relationships, or sometimes about what’s controversial on the county level. Sometimes he’ll talk about town issues that he thinks legislators might consider interesting.
Most times, he’s generally ignored, though politely received. Media doesn’t pay much attention to guest speakers at legislative sessions, even less to guest politicians.
So Chipman was operating pretty much in a vacuum until he “volunteered” his town for a county landfill, so suggested the blaring lead-story headlines in the daily a few days later. Now, he’s a celebrity in his own town, and for all the wrong reasons, however misunderstood. “Chips,” as locals like to call him, says he’s up for a third term next year. He’s got about eight months before party caucuses to mend fences, but he’d better be careful what he says at legislative meetings.
Home for the holidays
The board of elections reports that final determination of the 46th District state Senate race between Democrat Cecilia Tkaczyk and Republican George Amedore may not be settled this week. A state appellate court issued a stay until Thursday to count the remaining 800 ballots while 16 ballots where residency is disputed are counted in Kingston. At last report, Amedore led by 110 votes, but Tkaczyk took 60 percent of the 2,800 absentee ballots previously opened in Ulster. Advantage: Tkaczyk.
Meanwhile, veteran state Sen. Steve Saland, R-Poughkeepsie, the most equivocal of politicians, has all but conceded the election to Democratic challenger Terry Gipson. Saland is down almost 1,200 votes with less than 2,300 to count. Conservative spoiler Neil DiCarlo polled more than 16,000 votes in the general election after narrowly losing a GOP primary to Saland. Saland infuriated the right wing of his party by his decidedly unequivocal vote for same-sex marriage last year. From the party’s fringe, the message was driven home: buck us, and we’ll buck you.
Comptrollers united
County Comptroller Elliott Auerbach didn’t exactly jump up and yell “I told you so!” when state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli boinked the RRA for questionable operational practices in an audit released last week. But he could have.
It was Auerbach, recall, in the first of two highly critical audits more than two years ago, who took the RRA to task for excessive debt — currently $23 million — and operational deficiencies. In typical fashion, RRA administration claimed it was aware of most problems cited and had corrected almost all. This is known in the auditing business as the “nobody-here-but-us-chickens” defense.
And this is the outfit to which we’re prepared to give all of the county’s garbage business?
Working on the railroad
“I don’t agree with the methods,” said Minority Leader Dave Donaldson, once a slavish devotee of the executive form of government, “but sometimes the results are what you want.”
The executive “methods” legislators were referring to involve excessive secrecy and a penchant for blindsiding potential targets of executive action. Like the Catskill Mountain Railroad.
Under a long-standing lease agreement with the county which expires in 2016, a group of upcountry volunteers centered in the Shandaken area has been working on rehabilitating stretches of the old Ulster-Delaware Railroad. The county, which had visions of moving Steamtown USA here from Vermont to create a scenic railroad, acquired the abandoned tracks from the bankrupt New York Central System in the late 1970s.
Volunteers have done yeoman work, much of it of the backbreaking variety, in restoring tracks between Mount Tremper and Phoenicia for a tube train and other tourism attractions. Spokesmen for the group say they’ve raised and committed more than $1.5 million to their projects. Much remains to be done on the 38-mile stretch between Kingston and Highmount, all of it labor-intensive and prohibitively costly. It will take time, lots of time.
The executive, apparently with input from rail-trail environmental interests, had a different idea. Tear up the tracks from Phoenicia to Highmount, he advises, sell the scrap iron for an estimated $650,000, and grade over the trackbed for what could be one of the more scenic walking trails in the country.
Even the Catskill railroad group found this a worthy idea, with the caveat that they grade over the tracks. But it seems nobody from administration bothered to talk to the volunteers until this proposal was virtually written in stone, which is to say in the 2013 budget.
The county executive does not soil his hands in controversy, but his obedient budget officer confirmed that there had in fact been no communication with railroad interests before the plan was announced at the executive’s budget presentation. Railroaders, understandably steamed, showed up in force at last week’s budget approval session of the legislature. They say they’ll seek legal advice, which of course won’t advance the mission of rebuilding the railroad one inch and could tie up plans to create a rail trail. Is this any way to run a government?
This sorry incident may not be fairly judged as standard operating procedure for this administration, but it certainly gives pause.
