Not everyone was happy about the vote, however. Mayor West and town Councilman Jeff Logan voted no to discussing the Fairweather recommendations on Jan. 24.
“What you want to do is not necessarily the right thing to do,” West said just prior to the vote. “What this would mean is that — if the board votes in favor of this — it means it doesn’t matter if these numbers are right, it doesn’t matter if these reports are filled with inaccuracies, because it would be committing us to move forward.”
The mayor and Logan have both expressed skepticism about the Finance Committee Report, which showed that the town and village would have saved $1.62 million if they merged back in 2011. Those savings would be on top of the $1 million New Paltz qualifies for under the state’s Citizen Empowerment Tax Credit consolidation program.
Logan noted that he might support consolidation if it could be proven that it was the best course of action. Essentially, he felt he had enough questions about the finance numbers and other subcommittee reports where he wanted more time to get answers before voting.
“I have what I think are very simple questions — one page of questions. I don’t see the supporting documentation. I don’t understand where some of these numbers come from,” the councilman said.
According to Supervisor Zimet, if the boards do agree to move forward with consolidation at the Jan. 24 meeting, there would still be two to four months’ worth of work to do.
Citizens, employees look for answers at consolidation meeting
The thought that the village and town might merge has many municipal employees running scared. They’re unsure if savings found by the Finance Committee will come at the expense of them still having a job. They called on their unions for help.
Howard Ball, a labor relations specialist with the CSEA, spoke on behalf of local government employees worried that consolidation would eliminate their jobs. A report by one of the subcommittees studying what job cuts might happen under consolidation — the Human Resources Committee — has a lot of town and village workers worried.
“What I don’t seem to understand and perhaps this could be explained to us, if the village and the town merge in some fashion, the number of roads, the miles of roads, the jobs that still have to be performed aren’t changing. So where do the staffing cuts come from?” Ball said.
The Human Resources Committee reports says that 13 jobs might be eliminated, mostly coming from the town’s Buildings and Grounds Department. People on the subcommittee have said that job cuts will come through retirement or attrition — not direct firings or layoffs.
Village Clerk Kathryn Dolye-Bunker asked the board members how it was possible that no one in the town or village clerk’s offices would be let go. She noted that both she and the Town Clerk Rosanna Mazzacarri were young — neither is likely to want to retire for years.
CSEA union spokesman Ball said he felt the Finance Committee report seemed haphazardly put together. “You did a report with what you thought, rather than actually doing the report and doing a report based on research. You issued a report and then did the research after the fact,” he said.
Don Kerr, who sat on the Human Resources Committee, said he didn’t have a problem with people asking questions about consolidation. He urged board members to give people answers.
“My sixth-grade arithmetic teacher said, ‘show your work.’ I think with something that’s going to be so important and that people are going to be looking at so carefully, it’s really important to show the work and show all the background information,” Kerr said.
He added that he felt the public had a strong desire for information, which the village and town boards should fulfill.
Other people felt the boards had done a poor job educating people about consolidation.
“I think there are certain aspects of consolidation that could be really, really great for our community: to improve how elections are run; to improve how the government represents its constituents,” said New Paltz resident Amanda Sisenstein. “I’m very dissatisfied with the public engagement of this project thus far. And I’ll take part of the blame, because I was on both public outreach committees.”
Sisenstein said she was unsure how effective her subcommittee or the board members in general had been in informing the public about the momentous vote they could hypothetically take later this year. She noted that people in New Paltz tend to vote down projects they feel uninformed about or don’t understand.
“I don’t want another middle school renovation ridiculousness,” she said. “I don’t want people voting on their fears, on misinformation. I don’t want people voting what their neighbor told them to vote. I want people to actually understand what this means, how it’s going to affect them.”
In 2010, New Paltz Central School District officials put up a now-infamous $50 million proposed renovation project to retool the middle school. Voters torpedoed that ballot proposal by 2,561 to 983.
According to Deputy Mayor Rhoads, the hours of consolidation meetings — and the hard-fought decisions — will be explained in an executive summary style of document yet to be developed, possibly by the outreach group.
Critics of consolidation have complained that Rhoads and other pro-consolidation politicians have too often told citizens to watch the hours of recorded subcommittee meeting videos to get their answers.
Those videos are available on YouTube by searching for the terms “New Paltz” and “consolidation.” You can also check out the “Consolidation New Paltz” Facebook group, which has many of those videos, reports and news articles posted. The full subcommittee reports are available on the Village of New Paltz website.
