Journalist and former Onteora School Board member David Wallis has joined Erin Moran and Anula Courtis in the 2025 race for Woodstock town supervisor. Of the three declared candidates, Wallis is the most critical of the job performance of incumbent town supervisor Bill McKenna, whom he characterized as “a man who hated his job.”
Wallis has served as managing director of Economic Hardship Reporting Project, an award-winning non-profit newsroom. He previously was opinion editor of The Forward and deputy editor of The New York Observer. He has contributed to The New Yorker, the Washington Post, The New York Times and The Guardian, among other publications.
Himself a parent, Wallis said he became disappointed with town supervisor McKenna’s leadership in regard to the town’s youth center. More immediately, he was inspired to run for the top seat after McKenna’s handling of the town’s recent closing of its warming center.
“After the Canadian wildfires, I guess it was two years ago, when kids couldn’t play outside because the air was so fouled,” he said, the youth center had asked about acquiring a filter for the youth center so the kids could breathe better. “I asked the director of the youth center, and it got bumped up to McKenna, which is a problem, because that’s in my opinion micromanagement of a $250 expense that should have been left up to the director.”
If he were elected, Wallis continued, he would give reasonable budgetary discretion to the youth director “to make decisions like that on a $250 public safety and health device.”
McKenna “just said no.”
Wallis criticized McKenna’s decision to close the town warming center in the front hallway at the town hall on Tinker Street because people made a mess and caused some damage.
“I was then chagrined to see how McKenna treated the people who were unhoused and sort of pushed them out of the warming center which is not really a warming center. It’s a hallway,” Wallis said. “I watched him, and I saw a man who hated his job, I think. I saw a man who had impatience with people who were vulnerable. I saw a situation where he decided to give them a ride to a shelter in Kingston rather than try and get security to cure the situation in Woodstock and figure out a way to treat unhoused people well and keep them safe in five-degree weather. I just would have never done that.
Wallis said his priority would be to make a clean, safe and welcoming warming center with hot drinks and to provide security so maintenance staff didn’t feel threatened.
PFOS, celltowers and housing
Wallis has a substantial to-do list, some echoing the positions taken by Woodstock councilmember Bennet Ratcliff and others striking out in new directions.
Cleaning up the contaminated fill on Church Road in Shady was first on his list.
“Clean up the Shady dump, enforce the laws, and the cost should ultimately be paid by the landowner who accepted that toxic waste on his land,” Wallis said.
Figuring out where and how the forever chemicals known as PFOS are getting into the municipal water supply go hand-in-hand with the cleanup issue.
“I have not learned at this moment the potential cost of a filtration system, but I think it has to be on the table,” Wallis said. “Maybe if we can’t figure out ultimately how to keep PFOS, which is deadly, out of our water supply, then we have to take other measures. They may include filtration.”
A volunteer fire police officer, Wallis wants to tackle the public-safety challenge posed by cellular dead zones. Service to most of the town is provided by a single town-owned tower on California Quarry Road leased to several providers. It does not cover the western end of town past Bearsville.
“I will certainly make every effort to fix the cellular-free zones in areas like Lake Hill, where it could really cause us mayhem and be a public-health emergency if we don’t have proper communications that are robust,” Wallis said. Cellular providers have said it was not worth the expense to install towers in the western end of town because there weren’t enough subscribers there.
Wallis said teamwork with other towns on this issue may be a solution. “You partner up with neighboring supervisors, and you won’t be going to the cellphone companies like Verizon alone and negotiate that way. You negotiate in force with a significant number of people who have the same problem,” he said. “Is it going to be a challenge? It most certainly will be. But has our current supervisor done enough to coordinate with the fire department and other supervisors of neighboring townships to take on Verizon? I don’t think he has.”
Wallis agreed the town needs affordable housing as rents soar. A recent flyer for an open house at 5 Rock City Road near the village green touts “Affordable Luxury” at rents ranging from $1750 to $2350 a month. In other locations, two-bedroom apartments can rent for sums approaching $4000. “It’s a crisis, and it’s hurting the tenants,” he said.
Wallis favors discouraging non-owner-occupied short-term rentals because they remove housing stock that would otherwise be used as long-term rentals.
He also wants to explore a rent-to-own housing option. “We need to recruit non-profit developers to build more affordable housing in Woodstock,” he said. “Real affordable housing.”
Salaries and term limits
Wallis wants to remove the ability of elected officials to approve their own raises.
“Bill McKenna gave himself a nearly 20 percent raise right after an election,” Wallis said. “That is a scandalous decision to make. And I wouldn’t have done that. It’s bad government.”
At the time, McKenna had cited a study that recommended salaries more in line with those in other towns. He also said the supervisor performed duties similar to the highway superintendent so the salary should be the same.
Wallis said he would push for term limits for all elected officials. He has vowed he himself would serve no more than two full terms.
The right thing to do
How would he handle emergencies?
Wallis draws an analogy with the world of journalism.
“I work on deadline” he explained. “You work on it on a different deadline. There are feature stories that you maybe luxuriate over, and you have a month to work on them, but I’ll work on a news story [instead]. Maybe I’ll work on that an hour or five hours or a day or less. And so I’ll work on both news stories and features in my newsletter, in my publication, which is the way I see towns. I see town management as a publication in some ways.”
Wallis wants to put an end to political retribution locally.
“I will be egalitarian when it comes to treatment of people who agree with me and don’t agree with me. I will deal with them in an equal way,” he said. “I’ll try to be an umpire who calls balls and strikes fairly. And if I’m elected, I won’t go after people who don’t agree with me or fight me on certain issues. It’s not my nature. I prefer civil dialog and policy debates.”
Wallis defended voting to consolidate the schools of the Onteora district, resulting in the closure of the Phoenicia Elementary School last year and perhaps Woodstock Elementary by 2028.
“I think it was the right thing to do fiscally. I think it was the right thing to do environmentally,” he said. “And I think rolling school buses past Bennett [Elementary] to a half-empty school in Phoenicia was the wrong decision for the district. “Remember, I was entrusted as a trustee to look out for taxpayers and students in the Onteora district, which stretches from about Samsonville all the way past Pine Hill. It shows that I’m willing to make a very hard decision that’s unpopular, because I think it’s right.”
That decision probably cost him his seat on the school board in the subsequent election.
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