Upon seeing upwards of 20 residents waiting for the November 7 New Paltz Town Board meeting to begin, one may have assumed that these engaged citizens were there to speak during the public hearing about the budget. They were not. The budget played a part in their presence, but they had taken time from their evenings to speak on another topic. Among them were many who may have thought that their time at public meetings had come to an end, including Rob Lucchesi, the town’s past police chief, and Neil Bettez, the prior supervisor. Drawn to this meeting were mental health professionals from the community, residents who wished to share their transformational experiences and current town employees willing to go on the record to defend a colleague, Phoenix Kawamoto.
The background is that the budget process is being approached with care by members of this town council. Two of the elected officials, including the supervisor, are fresh appointees who have never participated in creating a town spending plan before. Supervisor Amanda Gotto has encouraged a climate of questioning assumptions, being well aware of the many successive years of high tax hikes in the town. On October 17, a significant amount of time was spent looking at the proposal for the office of community wellness, which Kawamoto has run solo for most of its eight-year existence. As with all department heads, Kawamoto had been asked to reduce the budgetary request for 2025; that resulted in a proposal which reduced employee hours and shifted some responsibilities to independent contractors who would provide videography and language interpretation services. When Gotto spoke about it earlier that month, the supervisor seemed satisfied that it could both cut costs and increase services.
Kawamoto was not present on October 17, when community wellness was part of the budget discussion. While council members may have felt that they were applying the same rigorous review to this department as to any other, community wellness is essentially a department of one, and the result is that questions about the services provided were received by some in the community — including Kawamoto — as personal attacks. The sense was that Kawamoto’s competence and integrity were being called into question. Board members questioned whether much of anything was being done in that department, for example, and wondered about how cash donations were handled when received.
Those members of the community who packed the justice center made it clear that they see things differently. They schooled board members on the history of this department, which was only created after residents laid the groundwork to address serious drug-related community issues as the Partnership for a Safer New Paltz, through which grant funding was eventually obtained to pay Kawamoto to advance wellness programs for a period of five years. When that grant program’s criteria were altered and it became clear it would be too narrow for continuing to fund this work Bettez, then supervisor, created the town job at the behest of many, including Lucchesi, who as a police lieutenant had helped write that original grant application, and placed a high value on what Kawamoto had been doing in the community.
What makes wellness challenging, council members were told again and again, is that its success cannot be quantified easily. Creating programs to vanquish isolation, training townsfolk on how to administer naloxone to arrest overdoses doesn’t create clear data points — as one person noted, if an individual is saved from a fatal overdose by another private citizen, that’s not tracked in any database. The general sense was that Kawamoto’s work is largely why New Paltz has weathered the opioid crisis better than many communities, but that’s challenging to document. Nevertheless, many in the community and who have worked with Kawamoto believe it to be true.
Kawamoto also spoke, and rarely has there been such a hush at a public meeting as descended at that time. The wellness director spoke about reviewing the October 17 discussion video, and the emotional and physical impacts experienced by hearing what was taken as a dismissive tone. “‘Oh yeah, the data,'” Kawamoto recalled one council member as saying, “‘there was a lot of data.'” That council member was not mentioned by name by Kawamoto, but Kitty Brown was for implying that Kawamoto “doesn’t do much of anything.” Struggling at times to maintain composure, Kawamoto spoke about putting such statements into the public record without there being anyone present to refute them immediately causes harm to the community, by undermining trust and increasing the likelihood that someone in need of help instead thinks, ‘why bother?’
In addition to the harm that Kawamoto reported having experienced, the director argued that the council response to the reduced budget request was wrongheaded. While retaining the employee levels as proposed, they cut the two contractors, which Kawamoto said would “gut” the department with a 56% cut. Among the many who rose to Kawamoto’s defense, some pointed out that the size of this department’s budget is quite small, and that the amount that’s accomplished with that money is outsized. At one point, Supervisor Gotto noted that other departments were facing cuts, with the ones to police and highway climbing into six digits, but it appeared that the message carried by most in that room was, ‘leave community wellness alone.’ Not all present agreed with the idea that these solutions are effective and that the money invested is returning something of value, but only two were willing to express any dissent during the meeting.
After the lengthy comment session, council members withdrew to discuss what they’d heard in executive session; state law allows for discussions about employees to remain private in that manner. When they returned, Gotto acknowledged that despite an intention to go about this process fairly, the size and characteristics of this particular department made it feel personal.
Budget for 2025 passed
In the end, the only cuts made to community wellness were those Kawamoto suggested; the contractors were retained in the budget that was passed.
Council members approved a spending plan that will result in a 6.87% increase to property tax bills. Supervisor Gotto noted that the initial proposals would have ballooned the budget by 9.2%.
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