On Turbulent Day, Mayor Booan Takes Office

4-9-10

Monie New Deputy Mayor; Chuck Hage Fills Trustee Spot

By JIM KEVLIN : COOPERSTOWN

Mayor Joseph J. Booan, Jr., wants village government to set goals and streamline government to them.
He also appointed Chuck Hage, the retired Eastman Kodak executive, to fill the vacancy his election as mayor created, and Trustee Willis J. Monie, Jr., as deputy mayor, replacing Trustee Jeff Katz.  Mike Molloy was named deputy village justice.
“We will need to determine over the next few months if our structure is efficient,” the mayor told his colleagues Monday, April 5, “or if we have continued to create an expanding bureaucracy that may have lost its sense of mission, and therefore has become less effecTive.”
Booan merged the Fire, Police and Pedestrian Safety committees into a new Public Safety Committee, with Trustee Neil Weiller as chair. 
The Streets & Buildings and Adopt A Site committees became the Maintenance Committee, with Monie as chair.  Monie will also chair the key Finance Committee.
Katz remains chair of the Doubleday Field Committee, and Trustee Lynne Mebust will chair the Parks and the Trolley committees, replacing former village administrator Giles Russell, who asked to step back, on the latter.  Hage will chair the Gateway Committee.
Newly elected Trustee Alton G. Dunn, III, won’t chair a committee, but was appointed to sit on three key committees – Finance, Maintenance and Public Safety – in preparation for responsibilities to come.
Former trustee Eric Hage remains on the Finance Committee, ex officio.
Booan will be directing the committee chairs – they still number about two dozen – to come up with a mission statement and goals within three months.
“I will hold the committees to their goals,” the new mayor said.
By August, he continued, he plans to issue the first of annual “State of the Village” reports, letting residents know where matters stand.
The reorganizational meeting came at the end of a daunting first day, as Booan, who was sworn in at 12 noon, replacing four-term mayor Carol B. Waller – she attended, and embraced her successor warmly – sought to allay village employees’ concerns resulting from the Good Friday shootings.
He met separately with office staff and the village crew, and was preparing “protocols” to guide people if such an emergency were to occur again.
While most of the mayor’s suggestions were routinely approved, there were some bumps.
After Trustees Katz and Mebust objected, Booan’s recommendation that David Borgstrom, Cooperstown Youth Baseball president, be named to the Gateway Committee, was rejected, 4-2.
Katz argued since Borgstrom had opposed the project, which in one form would have absorbed the Little League’s Beanie Ainslie Field, he would not be an objective participant in deliberations.  Weiller and Monie agreed.
The trustees also rejected Booan’s suggestion that they hold shorter meetings twice a month, instead of the single marathon meeting that often extends to the wee hours.
However, they agreed to shift the starting time from 7:30 to 6:30, and expressed the desire that the single meeting be shorter.  It was also moved from the third to the fourth Monday of the month.