Though it’s January, the race for town supervisor of Woodstock is already competitive. Erin Moran and councilmember Anula Courtis are seeking the Democratic nomination for town supervisor in the June primary. Signature-gathering for petitions to get on the Democratic primary ballot begins in late February. Supervisor Bill McKenna does not intend to seek re-election. He had fought off a challenge by councilmember and adversary Bennet Ratcliff to keep his position in 2023, winning more than 70 percent of the vote.
Former deputy supervisor and longtime Onteora school board member Laurie Osmond and Station Bar & Curio owner Lily Korolkoff are running for town council seats.
The four, along with candidate for county clerk Alexandria Wojcik, made their pitches to the Woodstock Democratic Committee (WDC) monthly meeting January 8.
The WDC will only endorse local offices, if it endorses at all. County offices will be handled by the county Democratic Committee.
Committee co-chair Jeff Collins believes it is likely additional candidates will run in the primary, but only the five have approached the committee to date.
Ratcliff and Maria-Elena Conte, whose council terms expire in December, have not announced their candidacies.
Anula Courtis
“Woodstock has always been a source of inspiration for me,” Courtis said. “It’s a place of creativity, resilience, collaboration. I feel that Woodstock is a community that aligns with my values and also has motivated me to dedicate myself to public service.”
Courtis was elected to the town board in November 2023. Before that, she founded a healthcare company dedicated to helping people afford their medications. She co-founded Woodstock Women’s March and worked alongside McKenna and then-county legislator Jonathan Heppner to form the Woodstock Human Rights Commission, which she chaired for four years.
“I worked tirelessly to secure a ten-percent property tax reduction for our fire and rescue volunteers. And this was really important, because I feel that it ensures that they understand that we value them and their contributions are essential to our safety,” Courtis said. “I created and got passed two short-term rental resolutions that strike a fair balance between taking care of our residents as well as our local businesses and welcoming visitors at the same time.”
Recently the town board enacted tiered fees for short-term rentals, charging significantly more where the owner is not on the premises. “But we favor those people who live here, and we help them out, and we have help them to stay here. That’s something that’s really important,” Courtis said.
Courtis also chairs the town’s bear task force, which she said would soon be presenting legislation to the town board.
She said she also “led the way for us to collaborate on a countywide art contest for grammar school-aged children.” The reception for that contest will be held at WAAM on January 18 at 3 p.m.
Courtis organized a town-hall meeting on water issues in response to contaminants being found in the municipal water supply. “There was so much confusion about what these chemicals in our water, what they are, and so I worked with many others to put that together and to ensure that we had professionals from the state and from the county to explain what these things are,” Courtis said.
“What we did that day was we started to craft actionable solutions, and now I’d like to see that continue this year.”
Key priorities include making roads safer, expanding housing opportunities, creating welcoming facilities for seniors and youth, and continuing police reform, she said. “I feel like together, we can tackle these challenges and build on the strengths that we already have here. And I look forward to continuing to work with people to hear ideas and collaborate on these solutions.”
Erin Moran
Erin Moran, a former Woodstock Democratic Committee member and until last summer acting chair of the Woodstock Environmental Commission, touted her work experience as a qualification to be town supervisor.
Moran attended the Onteora schools, moved away, then moved back to Woodstock after 16 years because of her love of the community. She met and married town judge Jason Lesko.
More recently, Moran is the defendant in a lawsuit filed by residents along Yankeetown Pond, 28 acres of which she acquired through a quitclaim deed. Moran argues a beaver deceiver is working there as designed to minimize flooding. She recently said rain and snow has returned the pond to normal levels.
“There was not a year that went by that I did not come back and visit. It was always kind of calling me,” Moran said about Woodstock.
Over 35 years, Moran has worked for mom-and-pops and Fortune 500 companies.
“For nine years I was a financial accountant. I’ve seen budgets as small as a couple hundred thousand and as large as a couple million,” Moran said. “The style that I would bring to this position if elected to town supervisor is one of being solution-oriented, and also thinking outside of the box …. And I think that’s really an important change right now for Woodstock. There seems to be a lot of non-movement, shall I say, on things. And I get frustrated sometimes, and I’d really like to see things brought to fruition.”
Moran touted her work on the environmental commission, taking the lead on Woodstock becoming a Climate Smart community.
She became a Cornell climate steward in 2021, studying the effects of climate change and how to mitigate it.
Her top three priorities if elected would be overhauling the police department, reorganizing the town website, and protecting the environment.
“The police department needs an overhaul,” she said. “I think there needs to be a policy established for a zero tolerance for hostile work environment. It seems like every town board [meeting] there’s resignations and reappointments of officers. The turnover rate is way too high I think for a small town, I’d rather work toward an effort of getting police officers that work here, stay here and thereby become part of the community and have a relationship with the people,” Moran said. Situations “more of a mental-health incident than a violation or a crime should be handled slightly differently.” Moran wants to look into officer training for mental-health incidents.
Addressing the town website and information technology, Moran noted the town website, computer hardware and email service were not handled by the same company. Combining them under one provider would help with efficiency, she said.
Moran said development, though is inevitable, can coexist with the environmental through proper planning.
Why is Moran running for supervisor rather than getting experience on the town board first? She said she has been engaged with the board and has done a lot of the work.
“I’m a person who gives 110 percent and I want to be able to give 110 percent, and if I’m on the town board I want to be in a position where I can really effect change,” she said. “Even though I haven’t had a title, I really have been walking the walk.”
Lily Korolkoff
A political newcomer, Lily Korolkoff opened Station Bar & Curio in July 2016. She moved to the area about ten years ago with her husband, Ben Rollins, and her son Theo, who was then six months old.
“I’ve always oscillated around Woodstock,” she said. “My parents have always had a house in Fleischmanns, so Woodstock was where we came for culture and food and music and art and People-watching and toys at the toy store and Navajo dolls at White Buffalo. I love this town, and I’m really proud to be here and to feel really accepted in this community.”
Before opening the Station, Korolkoff was a union stagehand in New York City for twelve years and was the Museum of Natural History’s touring electrician for ten. She still works with the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, as their lighting designer.
In her work, she said, she’s learned how to deal with different people.
She didn’t go to a conventional college, but was on the debate team at Bronx High School of Science and competed on the national level. She said that taught her how to do fact-based research and how to argue both sides of an issue.
Korolkoff called working at a bar for the last decade “pretty illuminating.”
“In a lot of ways, it can be, you know, really frustrating, because you’re not always in a position to help people the way that you want to help them, even though you’re hearing their day-to-day concerns and their problems and the way that things affect them,” she said. “I’m really proud of Station. I know it’s just a bar on paper, but what I really like about that community — and it is a community in a weird way — is that there are different generations, people from different political backgrounds and socioeconomic backgrounds helping each other find jobs, giving each other jobs, helping people find housing.”
Korolkoff said she was initially afraid to run because the tone in the room has been full of vitriol and negative. “And I think it turns away good people with really good, innovative ideas and people that might want to volunteer,” she said. “So I figured I would get over that fear and do it.”
As a mother of a child at Woodstock Elementary School, Korolkoff said she sees the effect of a dwindling family population and the potential of the school’s closing.
As a renter, Korolkoff is worried about housing security.
“I know that if my rental that I live in, that I call home, was to turn into a short-term rental, I don’t know where I would go, and there is a big possibility that I wouldn’t stay in Woodstock. So it’s a real-world concern for me,” she said. “As a business owner, short-term rentals are killing the ability for me to hire within town. But it’s also something that draws tourism, and I know that there’s a lot of businesses that rely on it. So it’s the idea of looking at issues that exist in our town on a real-world scale, and understanding the interconnectedness of it, and how there’s a lot of nuanced things that people don’t really think about.”
Though Korolkoff likes the proposal from the youth center task force, she wants to make sure the new buildings, once built, have adequate programming. “I think that the youth and the elderly population are completely underserved here. From the lack of sidewalks to the lack of programming, that’s why people come to the bar,” she said.
Judith Kerman asked how Korolkoff, as a business owner, would deal with the relations between longtime residents and issues that tourism brings.
Korolkoff said the Station has been dealing with issues of sound which can only be resolved reasonably is by stipulating decibel levels in the law. “If you have a decibel level at your property line that you have to adhere to, you adhere to it, and it’s very cut-and-dry,” she said.
Laurie Osmond
Laurie Osmond, who spent 14 years on the Onteora school board, many of those as president, and had a brief stint as deputy town supervisor, is running for one of two seats on the town board. She now serves on the Youth Center Task Force.
Prior to moving to Woodstock, Osmond was in television writing and producing.
“I find myself continuously drawn towards public service, and I love this town, and I would like to help to improve the way things have been,” she said. “I would like to make this a more attractive town and more a town that will both attract and retain residents, especially families.”
Osmond said she is not trying to attract any particular economic class, but thinks it is important to have something for kids to do and schools to go to.
“I understand that the decision to close or not close Woodstock Elementary has not been written in stone. There are a lot of unanswered questions. There are a lot of missing figures and
missing information from the Onteora administration about that,” she said. “I am opposed to the closing Woodstock Elementary. I was opposed to the closing of Phoenicia Elementary. And when I ran for the [school] board in 2008, it was to stop the closure of schools. And we had record turnout, and we did vote in the majority and voted to rescind the closure of Phoenicia.”
That school has since been closed.
Osmond said the town should be looking at multifamily homes and working on affordable housing with organizations like RUPCO. Osmond is opposed to putting housing in town parking lots.
“I don’t think we need to be putting high-density housing in the middle of town,” she said. “I find it a little bit insulting to people to assume that, oh, well, you’re not going to be able to afford a car, so you’re going to need to be in the parking lot so you can actually work. Also, we are a tourist town. If we take away parking, where are people going to go? They’re either going to go elsewhere or they’re going to park on the side streets, and then our residents are going to be impacted. It’s going to be a mess.
Osmond believes the town board should have a code of conduct, much like the school board has.
“There has to be a clear agreement as to how people act, how they conduct themselves, and also as to the processes,” she said.
She also believes the town board should set annual goals like the school board does.
“I would say, pick five issues and say we’re going to discuss and vote on these things this year, and get them done, or get them not done, but at least have them as the five priorities,” she said.
She also suggested the town board agenda be released on Fridays to give people enough time to prepare and ask questions.
Again borrowing from the school board, she said that professional development in the form of a retreat would be helpful. She thinks that the town board should hire a coach to help guide ways to communicate better, ways to serve the people better.
“To get things bogged down into interpersonal conflict does not serve the town well,” she said, “and sometimes it takes another person who steps in as a coach or group therapist, almost, to identify behavior, describe how they could be handled, how situations could be handled in other ways, in order to move the work of the people along better.”
Alex Wojcik
Alexandria “Alex” Wojcik, deputy mayor of the Village of New Paltz, is making a bid for Ulster County clerk, challenging acting clerk Taylor Bruck.
“We have an opportunity to look at it to be less of a pencil-pushing routine position, which is how I think we’ve been treating it in my whole lifetime, for sure,” she said.
Wojcik said her work as deputy mayor touches on what she wants to do as clerk, including hosting paperwork parties for businesses or for people to get on the list for affordable housing.
She says she wants to improve county resources like the parcel viewer, an interactive map that provides details on all properties in the county.
“Imagine if that parcel viewer were a little bit more user friendly and interacted with different maps that we have,” she said, “Things like natural resource inventories, wetlands inventories, open space inventories. We’ve got our affordable housing overlays all over the place, stuff like that. And so imagine if those different maps that we create on the local level actually interacted in some way as a layer with the parcel viewer.”
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