“You’re making me look bad! Shut the (f) up!”
“Mayor, you can go (blank) in your hat!”
“Now you’re talking my language!”
An uneven struggle
This didn’t make all our papers, but I was able to catch up with Legislator Wayne Harris to ask him why he quit the railroad advisory board after only one meeting. Former county legislator Mike Berardi, chairman of the advisory board, also resigned, saying he wouldn’t be part of a one-sided closed-door process that he saw as discrediting the railroad.
Harris apparently didn’t have issues with closed-door meetings. He said county executive Hein had sent out several invitations to Catskill Mountain Railroad people to discuss their differences in private, but had gotten no response. For reasons I didn’t quite get, Harris said he resigned his railroad advisory position in the belief “that I could be more effective as a sitting legislator.” Harris will be leaving the legislature in December after a dozen years in office.
Railroad people haven’t gotten back to me, but it’s not hard to figure out why they might want to boycott closed-door meetings with the man whose mission is to literally demolish what they’ve tried to build up over more than two decades. Here, I refer to the short Kingston-Hurley stretch of the railroad which Hein plans to rip up to create an urban walking trail. Hein will allow CMRR to retain and operate its Mount-Pleasant-to-Phoenicia scenic run.
Railroaders probably understand this by now, but Hein does not negotiate once his plans are in place. The choices are to accept his proposal or suffer the consequences. And as the railroaders are beginning to appreciate, that can be severe.
Railroaders have only one choice now: take their case to the public. Unfortunately, for them, Hein with his efficient public-relations machine, is way, way down the track on that one.
This is not to say railroaders should continue to snub the executive. Baiting the bear will only make him angry and resentful, and that won’t be productive. Millions of dollars of (presumably) state and federal grant money may come flowing into the rail-trail program over the next few years. With at least sympathy at court, a few crumbs could drop on cash-starved volunteers railroaders to help maintain what has always been a prohibitively expensive proposition.
So suck it up, all you sons and daughters of Casey Jones. Take a meeting with the executive (and maybe bring a lawyer familiar with municipal law and leases) and see what happens. For railroaders, it can’t get much worse. Can it?
