Trustee Chuck Hage Resigns From Village Board

Hage

COOPERSTOWN

Saying his role in Cooperstown’s “Gateway” project is at a end, Chuck Hage has submitted his resignation from the Village Board to Mayor Joe Booan.
“I have given all that I had to offer regarding (the Gateway) and now hereby respectfully resign from the Board of Trustees,” said Hage, who Booan had appointed to a vacancy in April.
The Gateway project – it has been scaled back from a visitors’ welcome center to a parking lot and trolley stop – has been in progress since U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-Utica, was local congressman; he retired in 2006.
Booan accepted Hage’s resignation with regret: “He has done an outstanding job for the residents of the Village of Cooperstown. 
“Clearly, he is a man of integrity.  All of Chuck’s work on the board was done with the interests of the residents at heart.  His participation in board discussions were insightful, and focused to solve issues in a cost-effective manner.”
The mayor said he intends to appoint a replacement, who would then have to run for a term in the March village elections.
When he assumed responsibility for the project, Hage wrote in his letter to Booan, it “had consumed five years, spent half a miller dollars, lost a million dollars in federal funding, was just beginning site design (and) had not begun the process of securing property rights.”
The village “could not forecast with confidence when construction would occur,” he said.
Hage’s resignation comes after the Village Board voted Tuesday, Dec. 14, on an agreement that ends the village’s association with CLA Site, the Saratoga-based consulting engineer charged from the beginning with moving the project forward.
After his appointment to chair the village’s Gateway Committee in April, Hage sought to apply the concept of “deliverables” – payment for work done – to CLA Site’s work.
In late summer, another consulting engineer was hired to double-check the work of Peter Loyola, CLA Site’s representative on the job.
Dissatisfied with the pace of progress, the trustees terminated the contract with CLA Site in November, withholding a final $200,000 payment to ensure the right-of-way acquisition would be completed.
When Loyola threatened to sue, Booan and Loyola worked out the agreement that calls for completion of the right-of-way next month, and an orderly transfer of materials from CLA Site to whoever wins the bid for the construction phase of the project.