Unlike Cahill, congressional candidate Sean Eldridge was blissfully brief. The partisan crowd responded with applause to his one-liner — no doubt a staple all over the district — that replacing Maurice Hinchey with Chris Gibson had been “a travesty.” Eldridge got a few chuckles when he referred to the district’s “whopping 1 percent Democratic majority.” That’s optimistic. With Gibson carrying the Independence and Conservative banners, the Democratic challenger could begin the campaign 40,000 votes in arrears.
Sean Eldridge. (Photo by Dan Barton)
On the other hand, all it takes is looks and a whole lot of money. Eldridge has both.
Tkaczyk got some good news shortly before the luncheon began. The Greene County Indies gave her their endorsement over Republican challenger George Amedore. In Ulster, where Tkaczyk buried Amedore by more than 8,000 votes two years ago, Indy Chairman Len Bernardo favors Amedore, but says the state committee won’t convene until mid-May to make a nomination.
This just in. With the Assembly and Senate at odds, the state primary date will revert to Sept. 9, the official date for primaries, unless the state legislature says otherwise.
All in all, local Democrats have to feel good going into Campaign 2014. Nobody has yet challenged popular incumbents Paul VanBlarcum for sheriff and Mary Work for Surrogate judge. At the same time, the Cahill-Zimet primary has the potential to tear asunder a party none too tight to begin with.
FERC us
To the surprise of almost no one, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has turned a deaf ear to pleas that it at least reconsider its decision — effective May 1 — to create a new energy capacity zone linking the Mid-Hudson with New York City. The upshot is (will be) that residents will pay at least 6 percent more in electric bills, businesses 10 percent.
Just about every officeholder, up to and including the ubiquitous U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, has called the reconfiguration unfair and onerous, apparently to no avail. Federal bureaucracies tend to ignore public opinion.
There was a small glimmer of hope in FERC’s no response to a letter from county executive Hein. The commission, according to a Poughkeepsie Journal report, responded that it does not comment on “pending cases.”
I’d give our local officials an A for effort on this one, despite a belated start, but a D-minus for effectiveness. They didn’t have clout.
RIP, mayors
I don’t know whether Kingston mayors Sottile and Shayne Gallo (immediate past and present) will forever attack each other over what amounts to a million-dollar misunderstanding. I wish they’d stop.
The facts, as they say in county court, are not in dispute. When Sottile, as alderman-at-large, took over for the suddenly dead mayor T.R. Gallo in January 2002, he said he found the city a million dollars in debt. Over a period of about half a dozen years, Sottile imposed deficit-busting tax increases to restore the fund balance. In 2011, his last year in office, he applied, with the council’s approval, some $800,000 from the fund balance to hold down the tax rate. This is standard procedure on all levels of local government.
Hugh Reynolds. (Photo: Dan Barton)
Shayne Gallo, the late mayor’s older brother, repeatedly accuses Sottile of leaving him with a million-dollar deficit. In fact, unlike Sottile, he inherited a healthy fund balance.
In truth, the beef between Gallo and Sottile has little to do with fiscal policy, say City Hall denizens. Rather, what split the mayors stems from Sottile’s refusal to appoint Gallo a city judge when Jim Gilpatric was elected to state Supreme Court. Sottile doesn’t say much about it, other than that “judicial temperament” was a factor in his decision.
Be that as it may, it’s all water under the bridge, at least under some bridges. Gallo has bigger fish to fry.
