For evidence, I offer the $8 million question, as in whatever happened to the $8 million County Exec Hein said he absolutely had to have from the proceeds of the sale of the county nursing home to balance this year’s budget?
Opinions vary. Rich Gerentine of Marlboro, veteran chairman of the legislature’s Ways and Means Committee, examined the budget for some eight weeks. He appeared clueless when asked how the executive had managed to balance the budget without the $8 million infusion. “Must be magic,” he said. I’m not aware of any other legislator who bothered to even ask.
One of our reporters queried the executive directly shortly after his budget signing ceremony last week. The administration saved it over the course of the year was the reply. Eight million? That’s 11 points on the property-tax rate. Imagine if they hadn’t “saved” all that money. Conclusion: The exec never needed the $8 million when he bullied and bluffed the legislature into voting for the nursing-home sale. And this budget is awash in cash, with the executive holding the key to the bank.
Here and there
Just in time for the holidays, open warfare has resumed in Saugerties between long-time Republican enemies Bob Aiello and Walter Frey. Frey, a one-term legislator, lost his bid for re-election against (then) eight-termer Aiello last year.
An active, energetic but ultimately ineffectual legislator — Frey chaired the legislative committee on Golden Hill that recommended nothing — Frey will be hard-pressed to upset the gaseous-but-popular Aiello.
On another Saugerties note, it’s time to give beleaguered Town Supervisor Kelly Myers some slack over her failure to include some $400,000 in Safety Net expenses in next year’s town budget. The supervisor is the town’s chief fiscal officer, but the four other (veteran) members of the town board should have known better and voted accordingly. Eventually they did.
County Republican Chairman Roger Rascoe, in arranging the renomination of GOP leadership across the bar at Mariner’s Harbor in Kingston last week, brings new meaning to the phrase informal gathering. What resulted in the “unanimous” (says Rascoe) approval of Chairwoman Terry Bernardo and Majority Leader Ken Ronk for another one-year term, started out as a GOP holiday gathering. Rascoe, who doesn’t like to drive to Kingston for meetings from his home in southern Ulster, apparently decided to kill two birds with one stone by interrupting festivities for some official business.
Bernardo and Ronk, faced with an all-powerful executive, didn’t exactly light it up this year, as evidenced by the 16-5 legislature vote on Hein’s policy-making budget. Will they be any more successful in an election year where the entire legislature defends its record? We’ll see. At least rival Democrats will have something less to plot about over the holidays.
And finally, condolences to the family of Rich Amato, one of Kingston’s more beloved characters, who died at 75 on Dec. 17. Amato, a retired postman, was a former city recreation commissioner widely given credit for pioneering the city’s slo-pitch softball program. An avid letter-to-the-editor writer and a former school board candidate, he was also a Bingo inspector.
