Is Cooperstown ‘Deeply Fractured’? And If So, Why Have Things Changed?

3-05-10

By JIM KEVLIN : COOPERSTOWN

As the two-hour League of Women Voters’ Candidates’ Night neared its 9 p.m. conclusion, attorney Mike Trossett stood up with the final question.
From when he graduated from CCS in 1985, Trossett began, he remembers a unified community.  People seemed to get along.  Certainly, they didn’t not disparage each other publicly.
How did that Cooperstown become “deeply fractured,” he asked, with citizens “at odds with each other?”
There was a pause as all 100 people in the high-ceilinged historic courtroom seemed to ponder the question.  Then the answers came forth.
Trustee candidate Alton G. “Chip” Dunn, III, said what’s needed is “a unity of effort,” noting what his mother, Nancy, retired village librarian, tells her children, “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet.”
Another trustee candidate, Sally Eldred, said no town is the same as it was a quarter-century ago:  “Life has changed everywhere.  We have to be receptive and open to new ideas.”
Lynne Mebust, the trustee who is running for a second term, said it may be that a national “contentiousness” is evident in localities as well.  She noted a residents vs. business divide in the village.
And the fourth candidate, Doug Walker, CCS Class of 1963, of his boyhood, “It was the old America.”
Then the mayoral candidates spoke.
Going door-to-door when he first ran for trustee in 2005, Jeff Katz said, he discovered “a clear insider and outsider divide,” which he called “the third rail in Cooperstown.”
Joe Booan recalled the time Trossett was referring too – the two were at CCS at the same time.  Today, when he knocks on doors and people respond, “’Hi, Joey.’  It’s a very good feeling.”
“There’s a taste in the community,” he said, “that we do not listen as a village board.  And it’s something I want to change.”
Said Dunn:  “I am for change.  What’s doesn’t change dies.”
But, he added, “progress is change that is planned.”