Police commission: needed?

Move to dissolve Town of New Paltz Police Commission sparks controversy | New Paltz Times

Is having a police commission, which is not very common, a good thing? My gut is "yes," but I agree that it doesn't work as well as it could. The commission is two broad areas of concern, as I recall:

1. fiscal issues such as the departmental budget and personnel promotions, and
2. personnel issues, like promotions and citizen complaints.

A side note here:  this is a recollection because I couldn't easily find it on the town web site.  I didn't see the link to the town code anywhere obvious, but that thing's search function is so horrible I would rather have the law quoted right on the police commission's portion of the town site.

Five volunteers aren't really able to do both of those jobs justice, and I think they're both critical to maintaining a thoroughly transparent and absolutely right-sized force.  

• Given the size of the budget, I think it's worth making sure that financial professionals, the kind that will probably never get elected and is willing to work for free, look over this immense spending plan.
• At the same time, having a group of people reviewing complaints makes sure that monitoring our protectors doesn't get lost in the wash of town business.

Jeff Logan says that "more government doesn't equal better government," and I imagine he disagrees with his father on the issue of consolidation, but I digress.  More government is a problem if it prevents things you want to encourage, or encourages things you want to prevent.  A citizen board reviewing complaints makes it easier and faster for a citizen to register one, and for the officer to have the matter resolved.  The fiscal oversight in no way slows down the town's budget process - the police commission found savings which weren't implemented because the budget wasn't passed on time.  More government in this case means better service for the same cost.  What's the down side?  The town council is reviewing a thoughtfully prepared budget?

I agree with Ira Margolis that the commission isn't perfect.  There's too much emphasis on money, at times, and not enough on the long-term consequences.  

• Jeff Logan called the donation of a new police dog "the gift which keeps on taking."  
• Our local police, like departments nationwide, have strong incentives to prioritize crimes which will generate income.  Specifically, they get to keep money and property seized in drug crimes, or some portion thereof.  It's the flip side of "running a government like a business:"  some crimes are literally worth more to the police than others.
• Every part-time officer we've hired has eventually become full-time.  Part-timers are hired because hey, they're so much cheaper because there's no benefits to pay.  Too bad it never stays that way.
• Giving SUNY security police status created another police force in the heart of our community, one which has no citizen oversight and heightens the sense that the college is apart from New Paltz.  Better to have them pay for the same police protection as the rest of us, just as they do for fire protection.

With the dual responsibilities the commission has, these kinds of decisions and events don't get the scrutiny they deserve.  Should we be mitigating for the external pressures on our police?  Do we consider the logical progression of our own decisions?

I'd rather see the commission stay.  The fact that they've annoyed our elected officials shows they're looking deeper than expected, and I like that.

What's going on at SUNY?

Ira Margolis has been a tireless advocate for opening all meetings by local government to the public - even those that aren't covered by the letter of the Open Meetings Law, like the stuff that happens on campus.  SUNY New Paltz is nestled in the village, but thanks to state law is immune to local public scrutiny.  As I mentioned to Toni Hokanson not long ago, it would probably take lobbying by town supervisors and mayors in all SUNY towns to get the laws to be changed so that the SUNY system was required to participate as members of those communities, instead of the monolithic and inpenetrable powers they have become.  Like any other large company, SUNY should have to interact with local authorities and community members, particularly since it happens to be immune to our medieval taxation system.

SUNY news that comes to me is usually in the form of rumor, innuendo, and Facebook chatter.  Here are some recent tidbits:

• The Students for Sustainable Agriculture are expecting their garden to be bulldozed this summer, when they're mostly out of town.  This is an organic garden that has been cultivated since 2005 in keeping with the club's mission to get the college to support local agriculture.
• The college is planning to kill its resident geese this summer (it's a great time to "do nefarious deeds" according to Rachel Lagodka).  Canada geese enjoy the lawns and open spaces of the campus, and alternatives that have been proposed, such as plantings that would discourage them from landing, have been passed on.
• The proposed expansion of the college southwards may end up being in the Village after all - I've heard they would like to hook up to our water and sewer, which would require annexation.  Our backwards system of taxing land will influence how this pans out, because the development would be taxable for the first forty years before returning the the taxless vacuum of state-owned land.

I've sent President Poskanzer an email asking for comment on the garden issue specifically - it's the one that I have the most credible information about.  I'm very curious to see if he decides it's better PR to reply or to ignore gadflies as insignificant pests.

Meet the Gadflies

New Paltz Gadfly isn't intended to be a solo operation - anyone who fits the requirements is permitted to throw their two cents in! Here's a list of contributors to the blog:

Terence P Ward is a freelance writer who has been slowly revising his personal history, and expects to have been born in New Paltz by 2015. Right now he's claiming to have lived here for twenty years. His user picture reflects a time when he had short hair, something he misses more and more as he tries to create a donation for Locks of Love.

KT Tobin Flusser is Chair of the Save the Middle School and is a close watcher of the New Paltz Board of Education. She is on the steering committee for New Paltz GreenWorks and has more initials than anyone else in New Paltz. KT is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at SUNY Albany, her dissertation topic is women in politics in Ulster County.

The New Paltz Gadfly seeks to be a blog that brings in views from a number of different New Paltz perspectives. Among those that have been invited to participate but have not yet done so are Butch Dener, Rachel Lagodka, Ira Margolis, and Mike Cerasaro.

Want to be a gadfly? It's easier than you think to do! There are a few simple rules you have to agree to follow:

1. You must live in New Paltz.
2. Your posts must relate to New Paltz.
3. You have to post under your real name. We're all neighbors here, and the New Paltz Gadfly isn't a forum for anonymous personal attacks. Take responsibility for your words.
4. The administrator reserves the right to delete posts that are out of bounds of good taste, which will like involve excessive profanity, unadulterated hate speech, and flat-out libel.
   

Think you fit the bill? Then get yourself a blogger account and slap a comment onto this post. You'll be up and complaining in no time.

The New Paltz Town Budget

I haven't looked deeply at the tentative budget for the Town of New Paltz, being that those documents are longer than a DEIS and perhaps more boring, but I found a couple of interesting tidbits about it in recent news coverage. Both the Elting Memorial Library and Moriello Pool have lines that cause me to raise an eyebrow; in both cases, a lack of foresight leads to an annoying problem.

Elting Memorial Library

Ira Margolis complained about the ramp into the library at my first meeting as a member of the Village Planning Board. He was concerned that the configuration of the wheelchair ramp could lead a disabled person to take a serious tumble down the stairs, and he wanted the library to put in a gate to prevent it.

I can understand how that one was missed - until I heard him talk about it, it never occurred to me that it was a dangerous situation. However, it was clear as day the next time I walked up that ramp. I don't blame the library for building it as they did (it was compliant with ADA rules, after all), but I find the board's resistance to fixing it until now to be disingenuous. It was an honest screwup, but one that was pointed out quite some time ago. If the board had been forthcoming about this sincere (and dangerous) mistake, and made it known that they wanted to fix it, I think they could have found some folks willing to pitch in to make things right. Instead, they wait months and then ask the Town to make it right? I wish they hadn't tried to dodge the issue.

Moriello Pool

Okay, the question is should we allow people to barbecue there without paying to get into the pool? According to director Bill Russell, no way! He's pretty ticked off that the budget is proposing an employee to monitor a gate into the playground/picnic area so folks can enjoy those taxpayer-funded benefits without going into the pool. According to the Russell "feels the idea is a waste of taxpayer dollars because the playground was intended to be part of the Moriello Park and the public can use it throughout the year - except during the 12 when the pool was open."

Um, Bill? Can you explain to me how much barbecuing and playground activity you expect to happen the other 40 weeks a year? And whether or not it's true that the playground was intended be part of your fiefdom, Bill, did it occur to you that maybe those taxpayers whose interests you are so interested in defending should have been asked if they wanted it gated off in the first place?

Of course Toni Hokanson, defender of the majority, also feels that it's a bad idea to make facilities paid for all by accessible to all, using the same argument she uses when she tries to minimize the overwhelming public opposition to Crossroads. I'd be more willing to agree with Toni in this case if she had submitted these plans to the Town Planning Board for approval, but wait! that's not necessary for the town government to do! Good golly Miss Molly, they are not subject to their own laws!

Overall I expect that Toni prepared the best budget she could, and I'm not criticizing it. I'm just interested in the gaggle of previously-made bad decisions that this process brings to light.

Crossroads Makes No Economic Sense

Crossroads at New Paltz is a heavily opposed 58-acre development slated for prime real estate just off of exit 18 on the New York State Thruway. It's a contentious parcel of land, having been the site of an historic fight against Wal-Mart in the 1990s. Crossroads is one of the primary reasons I invited Ira Margolis to write for this blog; I know he and I have differing views on this mixed-use development, and I know it would be a lot more fun around here if other viewpoints were represented. I'm still hopeful about Ira, but I digress.

I had ample opportunity to study this project during my year on the Town Planning Board, and certainly would have voted against it had I continued in that capacity. (The reasons I had for leaving would be best left for another post, perhaps closer to the 2009 elections.) My main reasons for disliking Crossroads were simple:

1. Economics.
2. Economics, and
3. Economics.

I won't deny that there are real environmental issues with this project, but they pale in comparison to the bad economic choices for the New Paltz community. Thank goodness we had a major economic crisis in this country that would throw this bad plan into sharp relief!

The Problem with a Consumer Economy
The United States is driven almost entirely by consumerism. A quarter of our GDP is driven by Christmas presents. Since World War II we have increasingly imported goods from elsewhere, because it's impossible to pay a decent wage and produce affordable product here (and one of these days I will have to talk about how unions have violated their trust and caused much of this meltdown, but again, that's a tangent for another day). We just don't make anything anymore.

Since we're so dependent on buying crap, we have gotten sucked more and more into a credit economy. No one waits to buy things until they have the money anymore. First houses, and then cars, became so costly that it seemed that borrowing was the only option. Of course now that credit is hard to come by, I'm praying that everyone will realize that, if you don't borrow the money, the prices will have to come down, since a big reason for that inflation was credit itself. It's very easy to by today's toys with tomorrow's money, at least as long as you expect to be making more money tomorrow.

Crossroads and Consumerism
So the direction of our country is towards a retail economy that can't be supported on a retail paycheck. Crossroads would bring that home to roost. New Paltz is already heavily tourist-dependent, with few opportunities to get a decent-paying job for skilled workers. The development as proposed would sacrifice one of our few chances to tilt that balance back, by giving up land that is zoned for light industrial use, and converting it into retail instead.

Mind you, there will be plenty of housing on this tract, but even the "affordable" section will be well beyond the price that one could expect an employee at, say, the Gap to afford for rent. The residents will go elsewhere to find jobs, and the employees will come from outside our community.

It just doesn't make sense in light of the flaws in our local and national economy, flaws which I have wondered about for years but many others are just now noticing. Toni Hokanson has argued that the plan would have been much worse under existing zoning, but I think that's a lousy way to govern. I like Toni and agree with many of her positions, but this one issue is going to ruin New Paltz if her defeatist attitude is allowed to hold sway. Reactive planning and zoning is exactly why Jonathan Wright has been arguing for a moratorium for years now - let's tell developers what makes sense for New Paltz first, so we don't have to consider one crappy plan after another. However, as I have found out myself, calls for a moratorium to allow us to plan intelligently fall upon deaf ears.

New Paltz Journal

New Paltz Journal can mean one of two things:

1. The New York Times section that highlights interesting news in our area. It's not often used, but was jam-packed back when Jason West was making headlines coast to coast with his gay marriage initiative.
2. The blog that is maintained by someone using the name "Malone Vandam."

I'm always interested in the former, but I don't get the latter. Several things about that site annoy me.

1. Identity. The individual hides behind a pen name. Anonymity is probably the best and worst feature of the infobahn, and this is a case where it's a bad idea. If you're going to comment about your neighbors, can't you do it to their faces? Let me be clear, lest a reader find that blog and be confused: Malone is not, as he states in the "About New Paltz Journal" page, Joel Cairo of the consulting firm Gutman, Cairo, O’Shaughnessy. Those are names of characters from The Maltese Falcon.
   
2. Comments. They're always disabled on the blog's posts. Why don't you want to hear what people have to say? What's the harm? My thought is that he or she hopes that comments will appear in other blogs, with a link back to the original post - it's a standard way to improve the traffic to a site.
3. Scope. If it's called the New Paltz Journal, why are so many of the posts not about New Paltz? As I sit here today, I have to hit "previous entry" four times to find a single entry about New Paltz - that's around sixty posts ago, by my rough count.
   

Why not call it "Political Journal of Some Secretive Guy That Happens to Live in New Paltz and Doesn't Particularly Care What You Think?"
Now I'm sure I'm not one to judge. Nobody reads this blog. Only one other person knows it even exists, to my knowledge. But if they ever do, I promise that all my posts will be about New Paltz, the comments will be on, and you will know my name. I've even asked another "local gadfly" if he would like to post here, and I told Ira Margolis that if he does, I would like him to follow the same rules. (I would ask Dorothy Jessup, but I do not believe I know the lady.)
So maybe Malone Vandam has very good reasons for hiding behind his computer screen, sharing views to which no one can directly reply about any number of topics not directly related to our community. But, since I don't know who he is and he doesn't allow comments, I can't ask him about that, can I?