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Thorny Issues
Rondout Valley Supers Wrestle County, State Over Trash, Elections

RONDOUT VALLEY – The most challenging issues that towns wrestle with are often those that deal with other levels of government. While in theory they represent largely the same people, different governmental entities have different priorities, and there can be clashes over exactly what it means to do the right thing. Locally, those difficulties often emerge between county and town governments. Even when it's the same taxpayers footing the bills, elected officials prefer to have another entity collecting those taxes if possible, making for an easier election season.

The fight over Safety Net has been a visible one: New York State has drastically cut its share of funding to this welfare program, and local governments have been required to pick up the slack. Counties administer the program, but Ulster was unique in the state in that its towns paid for it. While County Executive Michael Hein agreed in principal to shoulder the rising cost over three years, Assemblyman Kevin Cahill stepped in to make sure that happened by holding the county's so-called "temporary" sales tax hostage until it was sealed.

Election costs are in a similar situation: since the passage of the Help America Vote Act, towns have no longer been running elections and maintaining New York's reliable old mechanical voting machines. That task now falls to the county, but through tradition the cost has continued to be passed down to the towns. The optical-scanning machines cost $6,000 or more, and don't last a fraction of the time of the old ones, some of which were in service for decades. Supervisors who railed against paying for a process that they no longer controlled finally found a sympathetic ear in Ulster County Legislative Chairman John Parete, who has agreed that Ulster County should pay for those programs which it administers. The supervisors' association unanimously agreed to recommend taking over the costs over the course of three years, which would have little impact on the county budget.

Counties, like all local governments, are subject to the tax cap, so Hein's reluctance to add more expenses to the county budget is not surprising, given that he regularly campaigns on his record of expanding services while holding the line on taxes. While he was not reached for this story, others have said that he's not excited about absorbing election costs. The amount it will affect the county's bottom line is likely to be small in comparison to the problems Ulster has faced with its Resource Recovery Agency, problems which are also now in the towns' bailiwick.

The RRA is an independent agency which was created in large part to site, build, and manage a local landfill which never manifested. The county is responsible for paying the agency's debts if it doesn't make enough money itself, debts which began with closing numerous town landfills over twenty years ago. The flow control law, requiring all carriers to use the RRA's Kingston facility, was enacted to resolve that problem, but the agency continues to spend huge amounts of money shipping the county's garbage to western New York. This has left precious little money for infrastructure investment, and now the agency has come to the towns with some steep demands.

Only the town transfer stations get pick-up service from the RRA, and so the agency wants the towns to now pay for keeping that service going. Most transfer stations are already running a deficit, but the RRA wants to hike the fee per ton, raise the pull charge which is assessed each time a container is hauled off, and add a new monthly rental fee for each container. Town supervisors were presented with this information as part of a ten-year proposed contract that did not include any pricing assurances.

"If I signed that contract, I should be impeached," said Michael Warren of Marbletown.

Carl Chipman, Rochester's supervisor and president of the county supervisors' association, hinted that challenging the law in court was not beyond the realm of possibility, but now thinks there are many other options to explore first.

"We got the RRA to agree to give us until June for the contract," he said, noting how in the meantime, he's put together a committee to study the issues; it includes several supervisors, recycling coordinators, and a county legislator. "We want to explore options for municipalities to solve these problems in the short term, and then look at the long term."

It could be that the solution is as simple as raising the tonnage fee on all customers. As Warren put it, "They say they want to run the RRA like a water district. A water district doesn't charge more to a customer just because the water has to go farther. We asked them what it would cost if they were to absorb these expenses across the entire business, and they thought it might be $2 a ton. Who would complain about that?"

According to Chipman, other options might include the towns purchasing their own trucks and containers to deliver the trash, as well as investigating if it would be legal to ship their garbage elsewhere.

Rochester has another problem as unsightly as garbage, and also caused in part by intergovernmental bickering: the cleanup of the Rainbow Diner. State officials want the cleanup to follow asbestos-abatement procedures, which would raise the cost to well above the value of the property itself. The owners have claimed they can't afford that, and Chipman has been reluctant to use taxpayer money for the job so there's been a lot of executive sessions at town board meetings discussing the litigation against the diner's owners.

Chipman reports that he's hopeful a resolution to the problem, which was an issue in the last election, will be announced in the near future.



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