As for the paying side of his professional life, he noted how he spent some 23 years working for “the cigarette company,” handling machine sales from our rural stretches all the way down to Westchester County and the City.
“You got to working with these Mafia sorts; it was an interesting job,” he noted in between tales of threats and bold bribes to stretch the regs surrounding the business. “It gave me a real practical sense of human nature…Hey, I was dealing with crooks. In the end I got sick of dealing with the city, and then I could read the writing on the wall when the studies started coming out about what cigarettes do to one, and how the companies had been lying.”
No, Leifeld added, he never started smoking during all that time. And he was happy when he left. “I stayed out of jail, I didn’t get shot,” he summarized. “I must have done something right.”
After which, coming off his work as an Olive constable, the future councilman and supervisor spent several years working for the county sheriff’s department and then 25 years working as a corrections officer down at the state prisons in Napanoch.
How did the shift from town council to supervisor happen, along with the dominance of his Democrats over Olive politics for the past quarter century?
“I had a series of political fortune-makers, I guess,” Leifeld replied, speaking briefly about a New Year’s Eve rape in the town when no police were on duty. “I made a push; remember, we had CB radios for communications then, no uniforms. I’d been on the council for about a dozen years and Lee Denman said he didn’t want to run again and I didn’t particularly care for the candidate my own party was getting behind so I gave it a try. And I kind of fit in there pretty good once I won. I get along real well with just about everybody and treated everyone the same.”
What big issues, over his many years working for Olive, stick with him now?
Leifeld didn’t think long, listing his work with the Coalition of Watershed Towns in the early 1990s, fighting New York City’s proposed regulation changes for its vast upstate watershed, then the resulting Memorandum of Agreement brokered by Governor George Pataki’s staff nearly 20 years ago. He’s proud of his own work with the City stabilizing assessments for its Ashokan lands, as well as all involved in the fight against the Large Parcel rule briefly enacted and that severely affected Olive a decade ago.
“We got the new meeting hall during my time, and I pushed through the senior citizen housing in Olivebridge myself. It seemed right to have it there,” he added. “I just started my third four year term with the Catskill Watershed Corporation and have really enjoyed my work with those guys. And then there’s the wastewater treatment plant we’ve gotten in Boiceville…”
Since leaving office at the end of December, and seeing his successor Sylvia Rozzelle take over his position after a time as town clerk equal to his time as both councilman and supervisor, Leifeld says he’s been “spending a lot of time in the house here like everybody else this winter. I’m bored out of my mind.” He’s had some health problems, including a bad back, and his wife Ann was in the hospital a while.
He goes off on the problems being faced in his old town, Shandaken, where the hamlet of Phoenicia has voted down a city-financed sewer system in hopes of holding out for a better deal. He notes how the whole area’s shifted from a place that was self-sufficient to bedroom communities. He thinks Rozzelle’s doing a fine job, even though he backed his longtime deputy supervisor and fellow councilman Bruce LaMonda against her last summer.
“I kind of figured that was the way things were going to go,” he said of her win…and comfort in his old job. “Sylvia’s cool; she’s no dummy. It’s going good.”
In the final rounds, Bert Leifeld added, he’s kind of pleased, too, to be roasted and toasted this weekend…even if it was “kind of supposed to be a secret, I hear.”
“I think, in the end,” he said quietly before heading off to the doctor’s, “the town will come out just fine.”
The Berndt Leifeld Retirement Party starts at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 30, at Twin Lakes in Hurley. There will be a $50 per person charge for the Democratic Party fundraising sit down dinner, plus a cash bar.
For further information and last minute reservations call Ternice Winne at 657-2058.
