The sun has barely been up 45 minutes. Rita Worthington, majority leader of the Kingston Common Council, had chosen this time for an interview. “I woke up at 6 a.m.,” she said. “That’s not farmer hours.”
For folks that like to honky-tonk around till two or three in the morning, it might as well be.
Currently serving her third term as alder for Ward 4, Kingston’s most diverse ward, Worthington said she hadn’t previously been politically active.
“You know, I still supported causes, but nothing official,” she said. “Mainly, I supported anything that was going on in the community that I thought was worthwhile.”
Born in Poughkeepsie, Worthington works as a law-firm paralegal. Her family moved to Kingston around the time she started middle school. Her mother worked as a psychiatric nurse at Benedictine Hospital.
Her mother was where Worthington got the public-servant attitude, she said. “She instilled that in us. We watched her take people in off the street, or friends of ours who were having difficulties at home. They would come stay with us. Everyone in my family does that, because that’s what we watched growing up. We were raised so that, if we can help someone along the way, we do so.”
The concept seems worn around the edges in 2023, fallen out of fashion — like hitchhiking.
“Well, hitchhiking’s dangerous now, right?” she said. “No, really, I think it’s economics. People that resort to violence, there’s usually a reason behind it. People lost their job or lost their home. So they resort to things that are going to help them.”
Is she suggesting that financial pressure is the driving cause of crime?
“I’m suggesting it’s part of it,” she reponded.
Was it a more important factor than education?
“I think the two may go hand and hand. When people don’t have resources, and when they don’t have jobs, you know, what do they resort to?”
Ward 4 is he local poster child for this self-perpetuating cycle of downward economic pressure and attendant crime. While there are many longtime locals who own their own homes here, the most densely packed ward in the city is a majority renter district.
Access to resources
“When I think about my ward, which is a majority-minority ward, I think the most important question for economically distressed communities is, why don’t we have the resources?” Worthington said. “I find that most people who have not experienced or had to live a certain way, we refer to it sometimes as privilege. And then some people think, well, I went to school. I got my education. I pulled myself up by the bootstraps! Can’t the next person do that? Well, like Martin Luther King said, what if you don’t have boots? And so they don’t relate that access to resources has something to do with that.”
Worthington feels that with the exception of Ward 5, another ward with a large concentration of minority populations, ample resources are dedicated to the remaining seven wards. Though she acknowledges that Ward 4 receives federal monies, she doesn’t see the infusion as aimed squarely enough at the people.
“In Ward 4, we have some amazing things. We have the Kingston Library. We have the Hodge Center. They just redid some sidewalks over there and some paving. I always wonder, though, if those entities weren’t there, how much federal dollars would be poured into this ward?”
Worthington suggests it’s a perverse disincentive that keeps Ward 4 economically depressed. Committing resources to the ward only at the levels the city commits to other wards would disqualify the city from receiving those federal funds, like CDBG grants, which have been used at least in part to improve those streets and sidewalks and help renovate the Hodge Center and the Kingston Public Library.
“Most times when you get federal dollars, it has to be earmarked for something,” noted Worthington. “Or it has to be used for economically distressed communities, right? That’s why we still get it. So if you didn’t have that, what replaces those monies?”
State and federally generated resources are not the only ones available to the ward. The wealthy, civic-minded Novo Foundation headed by Peter Buffett has invested among other places in The Kingston Food-Co-op, Radio Kingston and the Broadway Bubble in Worthington’s district.
“Buffett seems to have a heart,” Worthington said. “Over the course of the summer we had many meetings, because he did say he wanted to come into the ward and see what he can do. And so we met with him. Why are you bringing the money in and what are you using your money for? He seems sincere, but when you’re talking to people, you know, they tell you what you want to hear. So we’ll have to wait and see.”
Affordable housing
What’s the top concern in Kingston presently? Worthington doesn’t hesitate.
“Housing,” she responded. “We know that we need more housing. We know gentrification is going on, and so we have to come up with solutions to battle both. The housing crisis, unfortunately, is happening everywhere. So now we just have to come up with some solutions to get people in homes and keep them in their homes.”
One of Worthington’s hopes is to renovate abandoned buildings in Kingston as affordable housing, much as the Kingston City Land Bank does. She would prefer an emphasis on the end result being truly affordable. Currently city residents chosen to move into to a property renovated by the Kingston City Land Bank still have to qualify for bank loans. Many would-be homeowners are disqualified from the process by poor financial histories.
“There’s so many properties,” she said. “I look at when I walk or drive around town. You see a lot of the abandoned buildings, and I don’t know all of the dynamics, but I’m thinking, you know, why can’t the city take that house and renovate it, fix it up?
Is it difficult to get progressive ideas through the common council? She doesn’t believe so.
“I think that with the council that we have now, everyone is primarily on the same page as far as the issues that plague our city. We have some smart people on the council, and I really believe that they want what’s best for the city and the people in it. Any differences that we have we’re able to come together and talk about.”
Worthington confesses a penchant for honesty in her dealings with others. She recognizes there will always be forces pushing back against change and equitable progress. Her interests are in results.
“It may be it is naïve, but that’s how I’ve always lived,” she said. “I believe that we should look at people over profit. That’s my philosophy. I understand the profit, the financial impact of having dollars coming into our city — but at the same time, is the money more important than people? You know, look around the city on Broadway, this streetscape is beautiful. But then I come out here, I see people sleeping on benches, right? How do you reconcile the two? That’s the question.”
People of means able to pay higher prices come in from the outside, with the end result that the people already here can’t afford to live here any more. They have to move. How is Ward 4 feeling these effects?
“I don’t know that gentrification is affecting it as much as it is Uptown or Downtown,” Worthington responded, “but we do have some people coming in here and buying up properties and jacking the rents. I haven’t seen a lot of the people moving out of Ward 4, but I’m sure it’s happening because it’s happening everywhere.”
The recent report on Kingston redistricting by the Benjamin Center showed Ward 4 and Ward 9 experienced the most significant population losses from 2010 to 2022. Whether these two wards were also experiencing higher rates of gentrification is more difficult to discern. Anecdotally, residents of Ward 9 claim gentrification is rife there. But Ward 9 had seen the largest population drain in the city even before the pandemic, and in the ensuing scramble to purchase housing that came with it, Ward 4 was not far behind.
The police are listening
Worthington served on the police commission for about a year in 2017 before getting elected as alder in 2017, She is a firm believer in community policing.
“My relationship with the Kingston Police Department was very contentious at one point. I am now an advocate of KPD chief [Egidio] Tinti. but then he and I would bump heads. But what we started doing was having community policing meetings down at the Progressive Baptist Church. The meetings increased after the George Floyd incident, and so we were having these monthly meetings where we had the Town of Ulster police, City of Kingston police. Sheriff Juan Figueroa would come, and the relationship started mending because we felt the police were now listening to the community.
“You should always have people in your community where the police come in, they’re able to talk to somebody in the community. Yeah, that should be happening everywhere. And so that’s the model that we want to go after. That’s what we’re pushing for.”
With the blessing of the previous Ward 4 alder, Christina Nina Dawson, Worthington ran for the seat. No one contested her campaign.
Over the last decade, Ward 4 has consistently recorded the lowest voter turnout in any Kingston ward for all contests, whether local, county or state. In four out of the last five local voting cycles, just nine percent out of the 1914 voting-age residents recorded by census data have shown up to vote for their representative on the common council.
By comparison the most competitive ward, alder Rennie Scott-Childress’s Ward 3, regularly sees turnouts four times that. Admittedly, the races in Ward 3 are more contentious, and Childress has faced an opponent in every election cycle. Worthington has run unopposed in every election cycle.
With the next election cycle coming in November of this year, did Worthington plan on running again?
That neighborly feel
“You know, it’s a question that I go back and forth with, because I do care,” she responded. “I care deeply about the people. I really do want to see things get better. And so I don’t know. There’s a few things out there. We have the mayor’s election coming up. We have the president of the council. Am I running for alderwoman again?”
Would she consider running to be the next mayor?
She tossed the question back. “Would I not be a good candidate?” she asked. “There’s a lot of opportunities out there. The key is to go where you can make the most difference. You know, you got to have a seat at the table.”
The table she now sits at involves seeking common ground with representatives from the eight other wards. Whatever Worthington’s political aspirations, her heart remains firmly set in her own ward.
“It really is a community of people that care about one another, you know, some of the things that I see, like someone might be in distress or maybe it was a house fire or something like that,” she said. “You literally see folks coming out starting campaigns to help that family. I’ve lived in Ward 4 for nearly 30 years. You know, different areas around in Ward 4 until I purchased my house. And so, that’s what I’ve seen. I’m able to go talk to my neighbors. It has that neighborly feel, that community feel. And so that’s very positive.”
On January 15, Worthington will be the featured speaker at the Martin Luther King Day celebratory service at the Point of Praise Family Life Worship Center on Hurley Avenue.
The event kicks off at 3:45 p.m., and all are welcome.
Join the family! 
