Decent Process
Almost everywhere one looks in Ulster County, things have gone desperately wrong with some of our public processes. County government, binging for years on hefty tax increases, is just about broke. Sure, at $2,000 of our tax dollars committed per household for a new jail, it was probably inevitable. But our legislators do regularly vote on things some of them don’t remotely understand, and they do sometimes have to vote to undo whatever they did the month or the year before. Sometimes they don’t even manage that. It’s a less than inspiring process to watch, but it often gets worse than that.
For instance there’s the county’s recent history with our region’s latest hot-button issue, casino gambling. One could, charitably, make the case that former legislative chairman Ward Todd and current chairman Gerentine were sweet-talked by silver tongued Modocs from Oklahoma bearing promises of payments-in-lieu-of-taxes to the county coffers. Must have been tough to resist. Less charitably but probably more accurately, one could say they conducted a series of secret and illegal meetings that nobody remembers with Modoc Chieftain Ron Golden Eagle Roberts, who at the time was under multiple federal indictments for a range of criminal activity to which he’s since plead guilty.
Who was it that did the due diligence work for the county on this one? Probably the same esteemed counsel that signed off on the provision compelling Ulster County to sue any of its towns that might object to putting a nice, new Modoc casino in it. Now it’s true it wouldn’t really have been the Modoc’s casino…it’d be far more accurate to call it the Bally or the Caesar’s casino or whoever their actual operating partner would have been. And when political reality made it clear to everyone the Modoc’s chances of pulling this off were close to zilch, the county, a year into the deal, actually had the chance to back out. So what’d they do? Well the same leadership that created the treaty …extended it… and it’s still binding today, even though there’s not going to be any Modoc casino. And did the county’s legislative leadership even ask if anyone in the county WANTED a casino? Well, no. So is it just us? or does anyone else think the county’s deliberative process could benefit from a bit more…transparency?
Of course bad process isn’t just a county problem, our state has, by consensus, the most dysfunctional legislature in the nation. And at the town level we’ve seen some wildly innovative process malfunctions, even locally. Shandaken’s just decided to create a new class of citizen based on how much land people own, and tax some people on a completely different basis than everyone else. Did anybody think to maybe clear this with, like, an attorney or the State or anything? Doesn’t look that way. And the legal fallout when one’s local process violates half-a-dozen constitutionally guaranteed rights for a decent portion of one’s citizens isn’t likely to be pretty or end cheaply. There is a price for process run amok, and at some point soon Shandaken’s likely to find out what that is.
Not quite amuck but still partly mired, Shandaken’s also got a Comp Plan going to public hearing June 17 from a committee appointed without so much as a wink toward the idea of representing a cross-section of the town’s views of its future. At best it appears a straightforward accommodation to the town’s leading developer. At worst perhaps, it’s confirmation that representative democracy sometimes fails by design to represent a broader constituency than those who financed the last election campaign. Depressing perhaps but a reflection of the way things sometimes do work. But that’s power politics, juiced by the mother’s milk of political influence. Process or problem, everyone’s entitled to their view of it.
Same with cell service, which most everyone obviously wants. After futzing around and ignoring the issue for its first year and a half in office, Shandaken’s town board finally passed a law to help bring it in. But will the town end up with the best service it can get, and that’ll benefit the taxpayers if possible, or are we going to see how many 16-story towers can be sited on properties owned by friends of the town board? No one knows which way it’ll go but all options are on the table now, and for everyone’s benefit may the best engineers prevail. At least that’s a process people can believe in.
Then there’s the large parcel issue, the last thing on the planet that should have been dropped on the Onteora School District but that through no fault of anyone around here, was. Well the bright spot here turns out to be Olive, which seems to have found a way out of some of this process mess through old-fashioned grassroots organizing, meaning people talking to each other. And they deserve all the credit in the world for it, because they focused on the concrete and wrested control of the large parcel issue and the school board because they bothered to show up to fight for themselves. Now there’s a lesson for the rest of us. Looking at their relative population base they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. But they won their battle because they cared enough to show up, which they did in numbers nobody figured was possible. Olivians cared about their taxes whereas most people in Woodstock and Shandaken and West Hurley didn’t, and there’s no fairer way to have won that struggle. Bottom line, they were nailed by a lousy process and they took it back by talking to each other. Could just be that’s the secret weapon, when process goes terribly wrong.
Tuesday June 21, from 2-9 PM, the school budget comes up for a vote again. We hope those who prevailed in the recent election will be gracious enough to focus this time on what will serve the kids in the district best. We urge people to talk with each other about it, and to vote YES.