Citizens of Year Demonstrate Challenges Can, Indeed, Be Met

1-1-10

‘America’s Most Perfect Village®” – it’s a heavy burden to bear.
The operative word is “most” – while we declare we’re closer to blessed perfection than anywhere else, we don’t claim to be perfect, period, (i.e., “America’s Perfect Village.”)
Living in Cooperstown is a delight, but it’s hard to ignore indications around us that we’re on a slippery slope in the wrong direction.
“America’s Slightly Less Most Perfect Village Than The Year Before” might be more like it.

•

It’s more than coincidental that The Freeman’s Journal & Richfield Springs NEWSPAPER’s four Citizens of The Year for 2009 all sense that.
Certainly, there’s nostalgia. 
Joseph J. Booan, Jr., being scooted down to Al Bolton’s barber shop by his grandmother for a first-day-of-summer clip.
Eric Hage’s boyhood family gatherings, parents, brother and sister, aunts and uncles and cousins everywhere, a scene the family replicates today.
Willis J. Monie, Jr., raised in a sleepy, pre-baseball-town-on-steroids.
Neil R. Weiller, golfing through summers above Otsego Lake.
But these guys have facts to back up their belief that Cooperstown is in decline.
Here’s one:  The village has $20 million in identified infrastructure shortfalls – streets, sewerage and water lines – to meet out of a $5 million annual budget.
Here’s another:  When next summer’s restoration of Brooklyn Avenue is complete, the reserve fund for streets will be exhausted.
A couple more:  Doubleday Fields needs $1 million in repairs; the village hall at 22 Main, another $1 million.

•

What’s been missing is a rigorous understanding of the challenges and a systematic way to approach them.
The latest case in point came Thursday, Dec. 17, at a special trustees’ meeting to determine village employees’ health-insurance coverage for 2010.
No benchmarks.  No expert outside analysis.  Simply an open-ended conversation between four board members, with free-floating input from village workers in the audience.
During 2008, questions by Hage and Weiller, a two-trustee minority on a seven-person board, had been routinely dismissed.  But the arrival of Booan and Monie last March changed that.
“There was nothing planned here,” said Weiller the other day.  “It was very serendipitous.  There’s no master plan.”
Monie’s take:  The trustees – now four out of seven – simply asked questions, and if the answers weren’t clear to them, they asked them again.

•

The most shocking – and illuminating – outcome of hours with the village’s treasurer and auditor was that the village board had been looking at the wrong number:  at cash flow instead of “net equity,” revenues +/- obligations.
$400,000 in “found” cash turned out to be a half-million dip in equity.

But this is just the beginning of the ideas to turn the village around:
• How about streamlining village government, reducing and two-dozen committees to a half-dozen?
• How about pro-active budgetting?  Instead of asking department heads for proposed budgets, then slashing them, why not decide on priorities and fund the budget accordingly?
• What about re-professionalizing village government?  It’s a complex day-to-day operation to be overseen by part timers who have other claims on their time.  Hire an expert, or can Village Clerk Teri Barown, efficient, calm and organized as she is, be moved to the next level?

•

Regrettably, all the progress of 2008 is in doubt.
Eric Hage, running a challenging business, is considering stepping aside.  (Don’t do it!)
Booan has been mentioned as a possible mayor, but his recent promotion from Milford BOCES principal to a key administrative position has him questioning if he can do it.  (Please, reconsider!)
If the balance on the village board shifts back, we could be right back where we were before the new bloc began “Reinventing 22 Main.”
The four have shown that Cooperstown’s decline is not inevitable, but forward-thinking people have to step forward. 
The party caucuses will be scheduled later this month.  Approach Booan, Hage, Monie and Weiller and see what you might do.
Let’s make Cooperstown “America’s MORE Most Perfect Village Than The Year Before” in 2010.