The Choice Is Yours, Not Theirs
We think the time has come to shift the way the town is going in a small but symbolic fashion. We think it’s time that one of our incumbents goes, and someone new comes onto the town board. We endorse Peter Friedel’s run for the Olive Town Board.
Who he should defeat is not a choice we care to make. The two candidates he is running against, Henry Rank and Linda Burkhardt, are both good people, strong workers, caring individuals who prove their love for Olive day in and day out. The town board, as it’s existed now for four years completely intact, and several decades in basic configuration, does a good job… running basic town business through a series of effective, community-minded committees, and looking after all the legal rigmarole, from Olive’s endless lawsuits with the city to its current attempts to get other towns to help us in our battle against the Large Parcel legislation that stunned us all a few years back. They do their work.
But it’s our belief that they’d still do their work just as well with a fresh face, a new voice and corresponding set of eyes, on the board. And therein lies the crux, as a Shakespearean character would have put it.
Throughout the past election season there’s been much talk about how those seeking political office would do better to wait until some of the present board decides to retire. Don’t shake the cart, in other words. Similarly, within the current discussion about a spending plan for the coming year, the idea of increasing salaries has come up as a means of attracting better candidates for the positions to be filled… as if they were jobs to be applied for to the current board.
Last winter, meanwhile, an entire town planning board was let to resign based on a political rift. And replaced by appointment, without open solicitation.
More recently, among the questions that came up in last weekend’s Meet the Candidates event, which had poor attendance but dedicated involvement by the town board, the subject of changing demographics in Olive resulted in quite a few complaints about the people moving into town and now making this their home. The lack of political involvement by so many in town was seen as the fault of everyone else but those in town government.
And I, as the press, writing about these matters, was characterized on a couple of occasions as being little more than an annoyance.
All of these things have weighed in our decision to endorse Peter Friedel here. We think it important that a new and different voice get on the town board, even if that voice is really not that new or different from those already there. WE also think it important that the job of setting the town’s political future not be left solely in the hands of those who have already been running the town for decades. Because that reeks of a political machine, and not the sort of democracy that makes for the best kinds of community.
Olive is a more diverse place than it was 20, 30 years ago when our current town board started setting itself in place. It’s likely to become even more diverse in the years to come.
Preparing for future changes, and even newer faces on our board, should not be a scary thing. The basic problems Olive faces, involving our continuous battles with New York City and State, are never going to go away. But they will respond to new tactics… and likely result over time in more new benefits, like the various recreational facilities our town boasts, and that others envy.
I doubt saying these things will win me any more friends in town than I have already at this point. But having covered Olive now for over five years, and dozens of municipalities in these Catskills for over 20 years, I feel these things need to be said.
Towns that refuse change too long grow stagnant, even with the best people in charge. Or they end up facing difficult upheavals.
Olive needs neither scenario, and with the choice of Peter Friedel as a new face on the town board, what changes occur will not be painful in any way. And they’ll make for a good start when we get the chance to look back at these fine years, and this fine board now entering its final days, in the time soon to come.
PS