Three members of the Woodstock Environmental Commission resigned last week citing a hostile work environment, one that councilmember Bennet Ratcliff claims is so pervasive that he’s forming a working group to look into it.
Alex Bolotow, ousted as WEC chair this spring, resigned. So did Arlene Weissman and Bob Wolff.
Bolotow said she could no longer work with town supervisor Bill McKenna and councilmember Laura Ricci, who is WEC liaison, especially after she was removed as chair in a manner she claims violated labor rules and town ethics law.
“Having to work directly with someone who I knew was willing to do that created too much of a hostile workplace,” Bolotow said. “They keep changing their story of why they wanted to replace me. And I think, now the story is maybe that I wasn’t polite enough about the drinking water being put at risk. But when it’s a choice between the safety of our drinking water and politeness in an email, I choose the drinking water safety each time.”
Bolotow was called to a March 28 meeting with McKenna, Ricci, deputy clerk Lynn Sehwerert, and bookkeeper Pam Boyle, She was accused of sexual harassment for an explicitly worded email which .expressed frustration about inaction on the Church Road dumping, in which she had said, “I expected I would get boobs in eighth grade but that didn’t happen.”
Bolotow said McKenna also pressed her on continued EC involvement in the dumping. She had said there was a resolution that required action, to which McKenna had allegedly replied, “I could pass a resolution saying I could shoot you. It doesn’t mean I’d be allowed to do it.”
McKenna and Ricci have said the email was not the single reason for ousting Bolotow as chair, but rather one of many. The town board had issues with her abrasiveness and leadership for some time and opted to delay her renewal in January with the rest of the board and committee chairs.
At the time of Bolotow’s March ouster, McKenna had said it had nothing to do with WEC’s stance on the Church Road cleanup. “The timing stinks. I won’t deny that,” McKenna said at that time.
The WEC had been critical of the town’s handling of the cleanup of 10 Church Road, where troubled contractor Joseph Karolys delivered more than 200 truckloads of fill containing construction debris..
The town has approved a plan to have the large construction debris removed from the property and the remaining fill moved away from the neighboring properties.
The WEC had urged removal of all fill from the property.
McKenna said the resignations were political, All three ex-members are working for Ratcliff’s campaign for supervisor, and WEC is the only panel from which several people have stepped down.
Bolotow said there was more to it than that.
“If I were Bill, and I saw that a lot of people who I frequently worked with were hoping that someone else would run the government, I might think that there was a reason for that,” Bolotow said. “We did all hope that Bennet was going to win the primary. And the reason is because we want to see a change in the government and in the way that Woodstock is run, and we want to see a leader who cares about the environment of Woodstock.”
Ratcliff, running for supervisor on the Working Families Party line after losing the Democratic primary to McKenna, said there was nothing investigative about his working group. The goal is to find solutions, not point fingers.
“It’s a task force that I am putting together to find solutions that will address the workplace hostility. That is clearly part of what both volunteers and full-time employees see in their work in Woodstock,” Ratcliff said. “To the extent that somebody thinks that’s political, when four police officers and a former dispatcher, and half a dozen people who are on volunteer committees, and people who write into the Hudson Valley One talk about the hostility that they experience, I think we just need to look for solutions.”
Ratcliff said it was time for a change in the way volunteers and workers are treated.
Ratcliff said he would be gathering information from people who have issues with the town’s workplace environment, and then forming a working group to come up with solutions. He hopes to have an update at the next meeting of the town board.
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