Bresee’s Project, More Assure Retiring Mayor’s Legacy

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There are things happening here,” Joe Bernier, City Hall’s retiring director of community development, reflected the other week as he watched the false front come off the former Bresee’s Department Store.
“There are not a lot of things happening in other places,” he said, “but there are things happening here.”
There are.  Bernier can take some credit.  But the lion’s share goes to the lion:  At Oneonta City Hall until noon, Jan. 1, 2010, when he hands over the gavel to his hand-picked successor, it is John S. Nader.
It’s been quite a year for Mayor Nader.
By year’s end, sod had been planted on the Memorial Walkway in Neahwa Park, a jewel in the city parks’ master plan that had been a decade in the implementation.
When concern about trees that would have to go looked like it would derail the project, the mayor, as he has often in his single term, convened a citizens’ meeting on the walkway’s site Aug. 11 and adjusted the concept enough that it went forward only slightly behind schedule.
By year’s end, the first big step – the removal of the 1950s-era false front on Bresee’s – in a $7 million project to return the beloved landmark to a centerpiece of downtown’s prosperity, had been taken.
On Sept. 2, Nader was able to summon reporters to City Hall to announce that Governor Paterson had released a $2.2 million Restore New York grant, the final piece needed to make the Bresee’s restoration financially viable.
“I felt if these things weren’t taken care of by the end of the year, they might move to the back burner in the next administration,” Nader said of those signature projects.
The steps achieved in the just completed year – during the deepest recession seven decades – have ensured Nader’s legacy projects are far enough along to remain on the front burner until completion, to the benefit of generations to come in his natal city.
For those reasons, but not for those reasons alone, HOMETOWN ONEONTA has selected John S. Nader as Citizen of the Year for 2009.
How many people in political life have a chance to line up their successors?
On March 23, the mayor, SUNY Delhi dean of liberal arts and sciences, announced he had been appointed provost, effective Jan. 1.  He would complete his term, but the demands of his new job required him to retire from public life.
He then summoned the city’s Democratic brain trust – his predecessor, Kim Muller, and Aldermen Kevin Hodne, Paul Robinson, Maureen Hennessy and Liz Shannon – to scout the field for candidates.
About that time, Nader had been spending a lot of time with Richard P. Miller Jr., the Hartwick College president who had decided to remain in Oneonta on his retirement.
Nader, Miller, Bernier and Caroline Lewis, the county’s economic developer, had put together a new initiative for downtown revival, and contracted with 55 Maple St., Miller and his wife Andi’s consulting firm, to move the effort forward.
When the search was done, Nader had recruited Miller, retired president of a national printing company, who rose to SUNY comptroller after he first retired in his mid-50s, into the Democratic candidacy.
“He indicated an interest; I asked him if he might have an interest,” said Nader.  And so it was done.
Despite a hard-fought campaign – the Republicans nominated a high-profile young candidate, Alderman Erik Miller, and SUNY senior Jason Corrigan ran as a independent, hammering at the propriety of the 55 Maple contractcity voters seconded Nader’s choice, electing Dick Miller by a comfortable margin.
Election Night in the packed Autumn Cafe, where city Democratics gathered, anticipating a victory party, Nader – for the last time, he’ll tell you – was everywhere, checking tallies, filling in the chalk board.
Shortly after 10 p.m., Mayor Nader made it official:  “That’s it,” he declared. His chosen successor would indeed succeed him.
Nader was born in 1956 in A.O. Fox Memorial Hospital and, except for four years at Ithaca College – he was president of the student body in 1976-77, graduating with a B.A. in political science, high honors – and time spent pursuing his M.A. and Ph.D. at the New School in New York City, he has lived here.
He was introduced early to local politics as his dad, Sam Nader, was elected mayor while John was still in the single digits.
The Bresee’s grants-seeking was foreshadowed by his father’s determination in 1962 – the younger Nader remembers the story vividly – to obtain a piece of John F. Kennedy’s newly available Accelerated Public Works money.
Sam Nader flew down to Washington, D.C., with City Chamberlain Tom Natoli and City Clerk Christine Mannona to be first in line with Oneonta’s application.
“We got more money than any city in New York State, except the Big Five,” the elder Nader recalled the other day with some satisfaction.
At the time, SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College were expanding, and the $2.5 million was used to rebuild West Street and upgrade the capacity of the water and sewer plants.
“I never saw my father do anything in public service that would benefit him in any way,” the son reflected.
John remembers a busy boyhood, lots of sports, plenty to do for a kid in a city with a Boys & Girls Club, a Y, a half-dozen significant parks.  He graduated from OHS in 1974.
While finishing up at Ithaca, Nader became Oneonta Yankees (now Tigers) general manager in 1977, and the next year was named NY-Penn League Executive of the Year.  For the next 25 years, he would be general manager or business manager of the team operated by his father and partner Sid Levine.
Nader has spent his career in academe at SUNY Delhi, teaching economics, the history of technology and public policy from 1980 until his promotion to dean in 2000.
He has two children, Rebecca, 20, and Mark, 19, from an earlier marriage – both are students in the SUNY system – and Rachel, 14, and Sarah, 11, by his marriage to Deb Marcus.
You’ve often seen Sarah with her father at public events, and she would go down to his City Hall office on Saturday mornings to study while her dad caught up on work.
“She told me she’s going to miss it,” dad said, fingering the keys he will hand over to Mayor Miller in the next few hours.
Nader’s first introduction to elective office was in 1987, when he began the first of six terms on the Otsego County Board of Representatives.
“The issues will come,” county Rep. Joe Kenyon, the Worcester Democrat, advised him.  “Get to know the people.  And if you can’t count to eight” – a majority on the Board of Representatives – “it doesn’t matter.”
At one point in the interview in his City Hall office on a recent Saturday, John Nader remembered one particularly good piece of advice from his dad:  Be cautious until you get to know people.  (Sam Nader had said, “If someone badmouths you in front of me, they’re badmouthing me in front of someone else.”)
And, as the interview proceeded, he admitted to being somewhat guarded, even today, with people he doesn’t know well.
Still, when asked about his heroes, he cited his father, then looked over his shoulder at the portrait of FDR that hangs behind his desk.
His favorite books?  Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom,” in what they reveal about “the kinds of decisions people had to make and the constraints they faced in making them.”
Favorite movie?  “The Godfather.”  When a “Godfather” trilogy is shown on TNT, he’s been known to cancel weekend plans to sit right through.
Part of it is his family’s immigrant experience:  His grandparents, Elias and Rose Nader, were turned away as Ellis Island on their first attempt to enter the country from their native Lebanon, diverted to Rio de Janeiro.  (His mother, the former Alice House, was from an old-time Oneonta family.)
But another part of it is Michael Corleone, “who begins as a complex and attractive character and ends as a detestable person.”
Political observers will tell you that, while Nader’s tenure in office, particularly this year, has been focused, he has not been doctrinaire.
he compromised.  When he concluded he had to, he even walked away:  Notably, from a biomass – woodchips to electricity – project in the Pony Farm Business Park he had energetically advocated, when local opposition burgeoned in 2007.  “We really needed to move on,” he said.
And when it surfaced this fall that three police officers may have had improper relations with young women while on duty, Nader sought to discharge the matter quickly with a review by the county District Attorney’s Office.
But when concern continued, it would have been unlike him to stonewall.
Instead, he brought in the Delaware County district attorney for a more in-depth, independent review by an entity with no ties to city police.  That is still ongoing.
His one regret?  “In the beginning, I would have reached out more to some of the Common Council members.”  His first two years were rocky, but things settled down considerably in the last two years.
Through it all, however, he nudged matters forward, particularly the Bresee’s project, which will turn the downtown anchor into 20 apartments, two penthouses on the top floor, and retail and office space at street level.
It will replace the deteriorated back of the building with an expanded and landscaped Wall Street parking lot by Library Park, and will renovate the former telephone exchange on Deitz Street and contiguous buildings.
At points, Nader – a parttime mayor – was in daily conversations with Bernier on the project. 
A particularly welcome breakthrough came in 2008 when Bloomfield•Schon, a Cincinnati developer that had just completed Cayuga Place in downtown Ithaca, agreed to take the project on.
“We weren’t sure we could get a quality developer,” he said.
After Jan. 1, Nader plans to extract himself completely from elected politics – “I think I have to” – both as a candidate and behind the scenes.
As time goes on, however, the former Opportunities for Otsego president is determined to remain active in civic life, as he has been all his life.
Regrets (and advice for his successor):  “I spent too much time on collective bargaining.  We have good people to do that.”
Still, John S. Nader leaves office with a sense of satisfaction, professional and personal.
“I’ve been very lucky,” he said.  “Everything I’ve wanted to do I’ve been able to do, in academe and elective office.  I’ve been very lucky.”