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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Eric Hage/Upstate’s Decline Drew Him To Politics
Eric Hage was raised in Rochester, where his father was an executive with Eastman Kodak.But his cousins were in the Cooperstown area, and the family spent their summers here.
It must have been a good experience, because dad Chuck and mom Ursula retired here, and over the years their children gravitated back.
Since 2002, Eric and Dan work together at Mohican Financial, their investment company at 21 Railroad Ave. Sister Maureen, with husband Matt Schuermann, is raising their daughters locally.
After high school, Eric attended Cornell, (where he was president of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity.) After receiving a B.S. in agricultural economics in 1986, he went on to Columbia, earning an MBA in finance and international economics in 1989.
He held trading and management positions at Smith Barney, Bear Stearns, and was director of convertible arbitrage accounts at Salomon Smith Barney before founding Mohican Financial.
He and wife Noel, a Suffern native he met in New York, have three children, John, 12, Ann, 10, and Mary, 6.
He was elected to the village board in 2007, drawn to politics by the decline of Upstate New York he’s observed over the years.
He remembers a vibrant Fort Plain – his parents were raised there – that has sadly declined today.
Joseph J. Booan, Jr., assumed leadership positions early.
He was quarterback for the CCS Redskins, (and ran track and threw discus.) And he was junior and senior class president.
He believes the nurturing he received at CCS – from Mrs. Kerr, English, Mr. Good, science, guidance counselor Bob Hage and Coach Ted Kantorowski, among others – led him to choose a career in education.
(The eldest, he must have provided an example for his siblings: Theresa Schmidt is an assistant principal and Alisa Garner and Jimmy are teachers, all in Virginia.)
Joe was born in Springfield, Mass., and spent his early years in Middletown, N.Y., but fondly remembers his summers and holidays in Cooperstown, visiting his grandparents on Irish Hill.
His dad, Joe Sr., and mother, Carol, soon moved the family north, where he was a social worker for the state Division of Youth, then at Broome Developmental in Oneonta; she worked at Thanksgiving Home, then for years at the Hall of Fame.
He received his B.A. from Springfield College, a master’s in psychology from SUNY Albany, and another master’s in educational leadership from Lynchburg College in Virginia, where he first taught (and met his future wife, Lisa, also a school psychologist; they have two children, Katie, 15, and Carmen, 12.)
Joe’s great-grandfather, recently arrived from Italy, helped build the D&H, and settled his family in Cooperstown.
Joe’s grandfather, Carmen was a telegraph operator and, when that line of work tapped out, worked for years at Church & Scott, then at Pioneer and Main.
When Joe Sr. brought the family back, Carmen provided him with a lot from the family parcel on High Street.
So when his grandmother died, Joe Jr., dearth to allow the properties to leave the family, moved his family to town and has been rehabbing the original Irish Hill home.
He joined ONC BOCES, first as supervisor of special ed, soon promoted to the Otsego Area Occupational Center in Milford, and recently promoted to one of two directors under BOCES Superintendent of School Nick Savin.
He led the ticket in a four-way race for two village board seats last March.
Neil R. Weiller/From Main Street Shop To 22 Main
Neil W. Weiller was raised in golden California.That was everybody’s dream in the decade and a half after World War II.
But Cooperstown was always in the back of his mind, as his mother, Virginia, planted hollyhocks from home in their backyard in Riverside.
His ancestors included Wyckoffs, Hokes, Rathbuns, Thayers, tenant farmers and hop growers in Otsego County back into the 19th century.
His father, Robert, and mother grew up on the same block in New York City, going to the same church and eventually marrying.
The newlyweds made a pilgrimage to Cooperstown in 1950, staying at The Otesaga and visiting the newly opened Farmers’ Museum.
After law school, the new attorney went west. Son Neil was born and recalls a “typical 1960s-’50s suburbia” childhood.
He studied accounting at USC and Stanford, then came east to New York City, working in increasingly responsible financial roles for Wedgwood, the maker of fine china, then Fred Joaillier, the high-end jeweler.
As dad Robert pledged he would do during that 1950 visit, he bought a summer house on Otsego Lake in 1983, and Neil visited frequently in the summers, moving fulltime in 1992 and opening Muskrat Hill, originally a ladies’ gift shop.
He’d never even worn a T-shirt before stumbling on the “Life Is Good” brand, but soon found that corner of his store was generating 60 percent of his business, so he specialized, later adding Croc shoes.
In his early years in Cooperstown, he was active in “everything,” serving for a period as the president of the Glimmerglass Opera Guild.
The parking debate drew him to run for office in 2008, leading the ticket in a four-way race for two seats on the Cooperstown village board.
Willis J. Monie, Jr./Always, There Was Baseball
Willis J. Monie Jr. was born in 1967 in New Hampshire, but his father established Willis J. Monie Books on Main Street and moved the family here when the son was in first grade.“It was small. We didn’t have the tourism we do today – only three stores with baseball cards,” he remembers.
There was the lake, and the gym, and Willis played basketball and baseball through JV, graduating from CCS in 1986.
He studied math and statistics at RPI in Troy. His goal was to be a statistician for a baseball team, not recognizing until later there were only 26 such jobs in the U.S.
After graduating, he moved to Augusta, Ga., where he did statistics for the local baseball team and got into retail with Rex TV, which transferred him around the state during the 1990s – Savannah, Athens and back to Augusta. He was married for a period.
Meanwhile, back in Cooperstown, Monie Books was expanding and Willis Sr. had “outgrown being able to do it by himself.”
Willis and his future bride, Dina Sams, came up for his sister Daphne’s wedding, and the pieces fell into place.
The couple and her children, Tyler, now at William and Mary, Chelsea, at the University of Philadelphia, and Anna, a CCS junior, moved to town in 2001.
Willis became friendly with Trustees Jeff Katz and Eric Hage through the Clark Sports Center’s basketball league, and with Trustee Lynn Mebust’s husband Kai.
So when he was asked to run for trustees – Willis Sr. had served on the school board for a dozen years – he ran as a Republican and was elected last March.
