“I feel that I’m a candidate who transcends ideology,” Michael Tierney told the Kingston Democratic Committee last week. “Many of you know me as a very progressive individual, but I bring people from all walks of life together. I come from a family of firemen and police officers who have consistently voted for different people than I have. That is my background: somebody who believes in the New Deal, who believes in the message that Bobby Kennedy spoke about in 1968 that we are only as good as the poorest member of our society.”
Rokosz Most: Why are you running for the common council?
Michael Tierney: Well, I think that I’m the best person for the job. I do think that the city is being run well, but I want everybody to reap those benefits. Tenants, workers and businesspeople, they all deserve the fruits of how good the city’s doing. And we can make improvements for tenants commercial and residential. For workers. For pedestrians.
RM: Your job at the county right now is constituent services. What is that?
MT: The kind of issues the city would have, you’re gonna call me up and you’re gonna say there’s a pothole in my street or people are running the stop sign all the time or the stop signs are gone. Those kinds of issues. But when I worked in Kevin Cahill’s office, I dealt with the constituent issues that affect that level of government at the state. So I’m not getting my emergency rental assistance, I’m not getting my unemployment.
That was my life from St. Patrick’s Day to Christmas 2021. Every day was ten or 15 people, I’m not getting through to the Department of Labor. March through December, our biggest thing was unemployment and just the dysfunction of the Department of Labor, of their inability to handle the number of people.
So a constituent could call me as the alderman and say, I’m not getting my Social Security check. That’s not a city issue. But I have the qualifications to help you. I have the relationships with our elected officials at all levels of government to help you. That’s what constituent service is, it’s cutting through the red tape to get you in the door, to make sure that your issue was resolved.
RM: So you’re a member of the rent guidelines board? Is that correct then to view you as an activist for renter’s rights?
MT: Activist is kind of a strong word, I’m a tenant who cares about tenants’ issues. You know, tenant law or law that is perceived as helping tenants just level the playing field. At the end of the day, being a landlord is a business. And this is what I would tell people. If you’re a property owner, and you have problems, you can afford an attorney. You talk to your attorney about this. With tenants, it’s about making sure that people have a roof over their head, feel safe in their homes and feel like they can come to the landlord when they have an issue. And when they can’t, that’s when the city has to step in.
RM: How do you feel about short term rental regulation?
MT: Realistically, there’s nothing wrong with having an Airbnb. When Airbnb was created, the inception of the idea was,‘ I’m going away for the weekend, I’m renting my house, I have an extra apartment in my house. I have a finished attic in my garage that I’ll rent out for two days.’ But when your entire business is renting your house short-term, you’re hotel owner at that point. You’re a Hilton.
If you’re buying a house, that could easily be five or six units, and you’re turning that into an Airbnb, I’ve got a problem. If you’re somebody renting the garage above your house, I don’t have a problem.
RM: Did you see that accessory dwellings were just okayed by the city?
MT: If your mom or grandma wants to live with you in the separate apartment, that’s a great thing. Studies have shown that that’s beneficial to the community, that’s beneficial to your family unit. You know, every other country has multi-generational families. We’re the only ones who think units are alone. So I don’t see ADUs as a problem or as the solution, it’s just a change that will probably bring more net benefits than the use.
The only net negative would be if every single-family home in the city did that. And then, you know, maybe we’d have issues with the water supply, like the sewage treatment. But I don’t see it as a problem. Is every building in this city, is every single-family house in the city going to build an accessory dwelling unit? No. So I think a lot of the opposition to it is overblown. We need housing, and do I think that this is the end-all solution to housing? Absolutely not.
RM: Do you think that the citywide rezoning going on right now is a positive thing?
MT: Yeah. We need more multifamily homes, we need more mixed-use development. You know, the city is always going to change. Development is not a bad thing. A city is a living organism. It’s always going to evolve, and we should be denser than what we are probably, as we all suffer from the effects of climate change, I think higher densities locals are the only ones that are really going to survive.
RM: What do you mean by that?
MT: I think that the power use of single-family homes, that’s going to end up being much more of a problem. Your energy use is higher in a single family, your water use is higher. Not to be Chicken Little, but we’re gonna have climate refugees, you know, 50 years from now.
RM: Do you have an idea of what kind of committee’s would you like to serve on?
MT: I don’t want to create more work for Elisa [Tinti, the city clerk], who’s very hard-working, but I think there should actually be more committees. For instance, why is there not a bespoke housing committee? A committee just for housing?
RM: Kingston has got a director of housing issues, Bartek Starodaj, so it seems like they’re handling that on the executive level, but you’d prefer to see that at the council level?
MT: Obviously there has to be a housing director, and I think Bartek is awesome. But at the same time, I think all legislators should be a little bit more of experts, and that’s not a criticism of the council. We should all be experts in housing, you know? Everybody needs a roof over their head. So if we have a committee that can actually deliberate on those topics, we can be better prepared rather than say going to finance or laws and rules or government operations committees.
RM: How is that different than a planning board or zoning board?
MT: I used to serve on the Village of New Paltz zoning board. A zoning board is more of a court than anything else because you only come to the zoning board when you want to break the law. And it grants you a variance, and so it doesn’t plan like the planning board does. It has a very narrow view. A zoning board is the board of appeals.
RM: For the committees that exist, do you have ideas about which committees you’d like to serve on?
MT: I’d like to serve on the finance committee. The primary goal of a legislative body is more or less appropriations. So, of course I want to serve on finance, I think that’s where a lot of the decisions are made. But as a freshman member, we’ll have to see. I can effectively serve on any committee. There’s always room for oversight and deliberation.
RM: How do you feel about The Kingstonian?
MT: I would say the same thing to you that I said to the Democratic Committee during interviews. It’s happening. I don’t think these lawsuits are going to go anywhere. I think it’s a waste of the city’s resources.
RM: Do you think it’s appropriate for The Kingstonian to receive a 25-year Pilot?
MT: If I was on the IDA, I probably would not have voted for that. But if Pilots were used to build something like the Karl Marx Hoff in Austria, a kilometer-long public housing development that houses something like 5000 people, I mean, I’m all on board.
RM: How do you balance that then against the money lost to the schools, through exemptions, knowing that children are going to come from these developments into those schools and dilute the tax base?
MT: At the same time, we can have even a broader conversation about why our property tax is the primary means of funding schools. That creates inequality in the first place.
RM: I’m not interested in what-about-ism, candidate.
MT: Ho, ho. But it’s not what-about-ism. That’s part of why there is such an inequality between say, New Paltz High School and Onteora. Onteora is considered a wealthy school district because Peter Buffett lives there [??]. It’d be a poorer district if he didn’t live there. Same thing with Red Hook because George Soros lives there. So they get less state aid. So their property taxes increase on working people. We need affordable housing. But at the same time, why isn’t the state or the federal government giving that money to KHA [Kingston Housing Authority] to do it? That’s where it should go to.
RM: The argument that I’m hearing is that you’re supporting these things because it’s the world we live in, but if you had your druthers you would want a public option.
MT: If it’s private, we’re just kicking the can down the road. The housing should be owned by the public. So, take Kathy Hochul’s, 800,000 housing units that are going to be built. Is it just going to be owned by private developers, or will the counties or the cities be able to be the owners of the housing? Frankly, the governor hasn’t really given a detailed plan on it.
RM: So the Golden Hill housing development looks like it’s going to be sold to the developers after construction.
MT: Yeah. They should be owned by the city or county. Public housing used to be something that you wanted to live in. And that’s what it should be. One, any rent that’s charged should only be affordable and, two, it shouldn’t go into the pocket of somebody from Brooklyn or from Paramusm. If the city was the owner, any rent is going to go to repair the roads, repair the sidewalks, improve the buildings. Rather than shareholders’ profits, it should go to us. Which is the way it works in France, in Germany, in Austria.
RM: So, in your vision, perhaps the city or the county engages with private developers who raise their own money to build and who make a profit but at the end of the deal the ownership always stays with the city or county?
MT: I mean, the county and the city don’t have a construction company. So obviously we would have to pay somebody to build the housing. You know, Americans paid for Europe’s social housing with the Marshall Plan, like why can’t we do it here? Everybody deserves a home. Everybody deserves a chance at life.
RM: How do you feel about the strong-mayor form of government?
MT: I would have to support it over an administrator. It would be the same thing if it was the city administrator but at least the mayor is accountable to the public. If alder were full-time positions, maybe that would be a different conversation, but honestly I have a hard time seeing it. Name a weak-mayor form of government that you think is functioning,
RM: If elected, what do you hope to accomplish?
MT: I want to further tenant protections. I want to see more crosswalks where people actually walk in the Second Ward. I mean I don’t own a car. I am totally a pedestrian now. Yeah. My car got totaled at the intersection by Deising’s Bakery because somebody ran the stop sign.
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