In 2012, Zimet had pushed an aggressive timetable to move the village and town toward a merger. A majority of town and village board members — even if they supported consolidation — asked the supervisor and Deputy Mayor Sally Rhoads to slow the breakneck pace. The cost of that waiting is that money from the state’s Citizen Empowerment Tax Credit program won’t be available to New Paltz until at least 2015. Delay has frustrated Zimet, who said town taxpayers are at a breaking point.
So even failing a true “townwide village,” the supervisor said she’d work to have sewer, water and planning become unified systems between both local governments.
“My belief is, is by the end of next year something will be different,” she said. “Is consolidation the answer? I don’t know. Do I inherently believe it’s the answer? Yeah, I do. I can be proven wrong, but you’ve got to do the work to get there.”
Mayor Jason West
Now in his second year of his second, non-consecutive term as New Paltz village mayor, Jason West believes that his administration has built a solid operational foundation that can now lead the community safely and surely into the next year. “I wish I could have waved a magic wand and put everything in place the day I was reelected,” said West, “but we all know that things take longer than we’d like.”
He compares looking at the way that the village government operated — or didn’t operate — to “looking under the roof of a car and seeing if the parts were in place and if they were in need of repair or replacement.” To be more exact, he cited the village’s Internet servers, e-mails and website.
“It hadn’t been upgraded since 2003, when I and my first administration got us online,” he said. “Those servers are so outdated that we can’t upload a file of more than 1.5 megabytes to our website. That sounds small, but it dramatically impacts our ability to communicate with the public, keep them abreast of our agendas, minutes, draft plans. It was an enormous loss of productivity that we’re finally getting rectified.”
Another example was the staff additions and reductions that he and his board put in place. “We hired a village planner at no cost to the taxpayers, instead of paying large sums of money to hire professional planners per project or pay grantwriters. Now we have someone that applicants can go to with a rough idea, and he [Curt Lavalla] can help them shape their project into something that the village wants, that will fit with the character of the neighborhood and be a boon to our community, instead of us always having to be reactive.”
The West administration also hired village clerk Katie Doyle-Bunker, who was born and raised in New Paltz, and about whom West can’t speak highly enough. “Katie has institutional knowledge, plus a wide range of skill sets that have been and will continue to be an asset to this village,” he said.
Looking forward, West said that by implementing the planning position, the village can undergo a comprehensive rewriting of its Master Plan, which was last updated in 1994. After that is reviewed and adopted, the village can move forward on a host of proposed zoning and zoning code definition changes, including Special Use Permit changes “that are desperately needed. This code dates back to the 1970s. We don’t have a lot of area left to build, so when we do have brick-and-mortar going up, it needs to be something that the community embraces, that enhances our quality of life, our tax base, our environment with green design.”
The mayor also cited the Open Space Study and Land Use and Transportation Studies that were heavily informed by the public and adopted by both the town and village boards, through which “we’ve been told over and over again what this community wants. Now we need our zoning to reflect it.”
West believes that the economy is not “going to get any better anytime soon,” and with the amount of money that the village has to pay towards double-digit percentage increases in insurance premiums, pension plans et cetera, “Having another zero-based budget is going to be very hard. I can’t speak for the town or the school, but there is nothing in the village budget to cut unless people don’t want their roads plowed. That’s being honest. We have 67 percent of our parcels off the tax rolls and a 39 percent poverty rate. So we have to look at things differently. We need to find more money and to create better public policy.”
To that end, one idea that West would like to pursue, into which he has already put a lot of research and inquiry, is a new approach to municipal waste collection, whereby the village would take over curbside pickup for all waste and then sell the recycling, the compost and other waste streams that have regenerative value. “Why give all of our money to Waste Management, when we could hire a few workers and do it ourselves?” he said. “Not only would we be more self-sustaining, but we could also reduce the cost of waste disposal for village residents and create a profit at the same time. There’s no middleman. It’s a low-hanging fruit that we need to look closely at,” he added, showing the New Paltz Times the research, number-crunching and input that he had already received on this idea from professionals free of cost, and from the Department of Public Works.
In the same vein, he said that he was looking at a streetlight near the Peace Park that needed to be replaced, and began to think about replacing it with a solar streetlamp, which prompted him to start researching and again, directing questions “to the people who have the information.” There are approximately 280 streetlamps within the Village of New Paltz. “Depending on the year, we pay Central Hudson approximately $65,000 to $80,000 a year in electric bills for those lights. What if we went out to bond, replaced them with street poles that resembled some of our earlier gas-lit streetlights and had them solar-generated?”
He suggested that not only would the money pay back in dividends over the course of several years, but “with the increasing amount of weather events and blackouts we’re having, it would be a public benefit to have lights that weren’t tied to the grid. We could even have sockets placed in them so people, during a blackout or emergency, could charge their cell phones and computers and be able to stay in touch with family and neighbors and emergency services.”
That made him reflect on what he sees as one of the greatest challenges that this community — and he, as one of its leaders — is facing with increased ferocity. “In my first term in office, we had three 100-year storms: three!” he said. “During the first two years of my second term we’ve had two major hurricanes, Irene and Sandy, and convened the Emergency Operation Center. This never existed in New Paltz before, and we haven’t had a budget for it; but it’s getting worse, not better. I now have to plan for a hurricane season anywhere from August through November.”
To that end, West, always the philosopher, said that in his belief, “Unless we change things, we as a species will not survive another century. We either get through this together, or we don’t get through it at all. It’s not about putting another finger in a dike; it’s about building a community dam. And we already have so many things going our way; our head is much farther out of the sand than most places. Look at the amount of CSAs we have, cyclists, pedestrians, trained, educated people willing to volunteer their time. That’s what I want: more people in the community coming forward with ideas and a willingness to jump in, like they did in the aftermath of Irene. I’d like to see as much positive civic engagement at every Village Board meeting as there is at an average pickup day at one of our CSA farms.”
Onward and upward.
Join the family! 
