Mike Calimano, former chair and longtime member of the Town of New Paltz’s Planning Board, will not be joining the zoning board of appeals at this time, despite the unanimous recommendation of its three current members. A number of town residents signed a letter expressing a preference for John Gotto, the chair of the town’s clean water and open space protection commission, over Calimano, and three members of the council agreed.
Appointments to any of the town boards, committees and commissions rests with the town council, but the process of arriving at these decisions has varied over the years. At times, prospective volunteers are interviewed at a town board meeting; these were conducted during executive session as a matter of course until supervisor Neil Bettez took office, when this was turned into an option given to the interview subject. It’s also not uncommon for members of the group in question to conduct their own interviews and pass a recommendation on to the town council. That’s what happened in this case, and initially Bettez wanted to act on that recommendation alone. However, that didn’t sit well with council member Julie Seyfert-Lillis, who was aware that five people had been interviewed by ZBA members. Seyfert-Lillis wanted to conduct interviews at a town council meeting, but instead Bettez distributed all the letters of interest and arranged for ZBA chair Leonard Loza to answer questions at this meeting.
Loza explained that Amy Donnelly and Calimano were recommended because they each had many years of experience working with the state’s environmental quality review act, a complicated law that must be followed during each application review. An application now before the ZBA is for the Homeland Towers cellular tower on Jansen Road, and it must be reviewed with some urgency because a federal law limits the amount of time that applications for these towers can be under consideration before they are either approved or denied. The learning curve for Calimano and Donnelly would be less of an uphill climb, the reasoning goes.
All board members agreed that Donnelly’s qualifications were just what the town needs, but with Calimano there was some divergence of opinion, and it was not the first time the name resulted in a close vote. Calimano served for 20 years on the planning board in two stretches, but at the end of 2017 only two members of the town council wanted to tack on another seven-year term. The two who supported the renewal, Jeff Logan and Marty Irwin, believed the removal to be retribution for Calimano’s vote for a negative declaration of environmental significance for the Trans-Hudson Management project on the north side of Route 299 next to the Thruway. Council member Dan Torres had called that April, 2017 vote a “litmus test for current planning board members who may seek appointment,” and both Bettez and Seyfert-Lillis had joined Torres in voting Calimano out.
While Loza lauded Calimano’s service, no one at the meeting mentioned the circumstances under which that service had ended. Bettez, joined by council member David Brownstein, said that a unanimous recommendation carries enough weight that it should be taken seriously, but Seyfert-Lillis proposed that Gotto’s knowledge about and concern for the environment would include a viewpoint not currently represented on that board. A number of residents had signed a letter in support of Donnelly and Gotto, Seyfert-Lillis noted, and that should also carry weight.
“It’s not a popularity contest,” said Bettez, but an evaluation of qualifications. It appears that all council members agreed that this was the case, but they differed in which qualifications mattered more to them. Only Bettez and Brownstein voted to appoint Calimano, opening the way to name Gotto instead.
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