Democratic candidate for Town Council, Theresa Hyatt, has a long history of both living in and serving the Town of Wawarsing. A lifelong resident, she began her political involvement when she took a seat on the Ellenville village board.

She moved to the Wawarsing town board in 1990, a position she held for three four-year terms. Hyatt was then elected to the Ulster County Legislature in 2002, after which she returned to Village Trustee. Now, Hyatt is seeking to reclaim her seat on the Wawarsing Town Board.

In addition to her political commitments in the area, Hyatt is also the supervisor of volunteer services for the New York State Correctional Department, acting as the liaison for volunteer programs that wish to offer services to those undergoing rehabilitation. Ready to resume her place on the town council, Hyatt believes that one of the key characteristics to being an ideal councilperson is a strong sense of fairness when making decisions.
“To me, I think that the most important characteristic that any elected representative should be able to give to their community is to be fair when they are making their decisions,” says Hyatt. “Whether they’re planning board, village, town, county — that they do their homework, know the facts, tap into all resources available to them…don’t just go by hearsay, don’t just keep everything status-quo… make a wise decision that benefits the majority of the people that you represent.”

During her tenure as a councilwoman and trustee, Hyatt has negotiated several union contracts with the Ellenville Police Department, three consecutive contracts with the town’s highway department, and put together a personnel policy manual for the town of Wawarsing. Hyatt has also fought to accurately represent what she sees as the wants and needs of her constituents, including voting to keep Wawarsing from becoming a county-wide dump site, as well as voting to block a blacktop plant from setting up operations in the area. But just as important as her commitment to keeping unpopular or potentially harmful programs out, Hyatt has made keeping funding for children’s programming a priority, ensuring that this funding never gets cut or diverted to other programs.

“One of the things that stands out about me is my advocacy for the kids, and the programs that are in our budget. I’ll scrape and scrimp and take from wherever else I can in the budget in order to leave the programs for the youth and leave them alone, and leave them intact.”

In keeping with that commitment to Wawarsing’s youth, Hyatt also cites her devotion to her own children as the primary reason for her absences from town and village meetings over the course of her political career in the area.

During her twelve year tenure on the Town Board, she missed 64 out of 288 board and audit meetigs meetings, which is an absence rate of a little over 20%, and since becoming a Village of Ellenville Trustee, out of the 37 meetings between January 9, 2006 and August 27 of this year, she missed 13, an absence rate of a little over 35%.

“I don’t ever miss a meeting that I’m supposed to be at just because I don’t feel like being there. Looking at the makeup of the boards I have sat on, I have probably been, other than Joe Stoeckeler, the youngest member of the boards, whether they’ve been the village board, town board, or even the county legislature, I was always the youngest person sitting there, therefore having the youngest children. When you have young kids, there are many ‘firsts’ that they are experiencing that I’m not going to miss to be at a village, town, or county meeting.”

As for the future, Hyatt hopes to continue to go to bat for the residents of the town by trying to bring in economic planners to return industry and jobs back to the area and to keep the hospital going strong by keeping funds coming to it. When asked what she’d say to someone on the fence about who to vote for, Hyatt is confident that she can let her record in area politics speak for itself.

“I would ask them to let me give them fifteen to twenty names of people and phone numbers that I could have them call themselves and have them talk to those people and let those people tell them what type of a representative I’ve been…what their perception is of me. Because it’s one thing when you toot your own horn…it’s a little bit different when you speak to someone else that maybe I’ve helped while I’ve been in town government or village government for seventeen years.”

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