Hearing the voices, all of them
Shortly after the polls closed last Tuesday, I had the privilege of standing inside the heart of the Town of Olive as it waited patiently to cast its votes. We were in a building named for a passionate educator who basically founded the Onteora school system: For those of you who don’t know Bennett, it’s a great school and a great place. I never knew Reginald Bennett but I’ve heard a lot about him from my buddy Howard Mosher, whose dad was his best friend. A native of Chichester, most of Reg’s favorite fishing holes are on what’s now my land, the same pools I’ve taught my kids to fish in. Like other places around here, I sometimes wonder how much or how little they’ve changed, like our towns themselves.
What I saw at Bennett School was the pride and purpose of people standing together to face what many believed was a threat to their community. For that, I loved and respected every one of them. But what struck me was that that’s exactly the same way I felt just a few hours before, seeing exactly the same thing in the faces at the Phoenicia School. After taking a few pictures, I asked election officials to show me the vote counters on the machines. Totaling the numbers and adding those who hadn’t voted yet, I saw that by the next morning, the heart of Olive would be hurting, as if it had somehow lost something, and I wondered what Reg Bennett would make of all this. If he were to run for school board today, to many he’d be an outsider in Olive too.
Any time a good school budget passes there’s reason to be pleased. We are pleased about that, and about the good judgment shown by the voters on the other ballot propositions. This year for the obvious reason I’m married to one of the board candidates, we made no endorsements nor otherwise sought to influence the election outcome. But the voters in every town, we think, did fine without our input. In Olive and Shandaken, strong bipartisan turnouts for local residents showed a healthy concern for those town’s interests. Hurley’s voters also turned out in decent numbers, Woodstock’s on the other hand, well, someone should probably inform most of that town that they live here too.
We congratulate Olive’s George Haug on what we see as an extremely successful write-in campaign. It was, as he said he hoped, a civics lesson of sorts, and it certainly drew an impressive voter turnout. But we take serious issue with those who sounded the false alarm that Large Parcel is somehow still alive as an issue or a threat to the town of Olive. Onteora’s board both before and after this election has a committed 4-vote majority (Olive’s 3 members plus board President David Patterson) which will insure that the issue cannot and will not come before the board for the next several years. So the issue is effectively deader than Elvis. And the fiction that it’s not, repeated in hundreds, perhaps thousands of calls to Olive’s voters, was in our view little more than a cynical manipulation. Why some tried to sell it to others is a question people in Olive really should be asking each other. We wish Olive well in its efforts to exclude reservoir properties from Large Parcel in the future, we certainly agree they shouldn’t be included. But we also think that trying to frighten and control one’s own neighbors through deception is not the right way to build community or even to maintain political control. Someone once asked Reg Bennett what it was he really taught kids up at the Sunshine Hill schoolhouse. “I teach them to tell the truth,” he said.
We’re not going to try and answer Pontius Pilate’s big question but we will say this: Elections are not about winning anything, they’re about governing, about trying to make things work as well as they can work. Olive did not lose anything in this election nor did Shandaken or the other towns win. What happened we think, is that a better sense of balance has been established, one that more accurately reflects Onteora’s different communities and their need to be represented. We think what it means is that we’ll see a somewhat more responsive, more inclusive, and more stable school board going forward. That we think, is a win for everyone and especially for every kid in the district.
To the three board candidates, we offer congratulations on a good and positive campaign. To the one new board member, I’m proud of you sweetheart, and I know you’ll do a great job. To the people of Shandaken, who, like those in Olive, turned out in force for what they believed was right and fair, I’m very proud to be one of you. We all know it’s tough to make a living here. Taxes, including school taxes are a real burden for most everyone but they weren’t what this election was about. That issue was taxation without representation, something that’s not only tyranny, but something no town should ever seek to impose on its neighbor. Every community’s entitled to a voice in our collective future. To everyone who came out to help find those voices and to be heard themselves, thank you for stepping up.
BP