By JIM KEVLIN : COOPERSTOWN
At the Village Board’s organizational meeting Monday, April 4, Mayor Joe Booan surprised some by naming Dr. Walter Franck, newly elected trustee, as deputy mayor. He replaced Trustee Willis Monie Jr., Booan’s last fellow Republican.
Booan also created an Economic Conservation Committee and appointed Jim Dean, a new trustee who ran on an anti-fracking platform, as chairman.
Booan provided Dean with a list of suggestions on issues to look at, but he urged the new chairman to “make the committee your own,” selecting members and charting an action agenda.
These appeared to be conciliatory steps – Democratic-endorsed Franck and Dean, as well as Ellen Tillapaugh Kuch and the reelected Jeff Katz, had defeated Booan’s Republican team in the March 15 village election.
Booan had already offered an olive branch in the form of a village trustee appointment for Gary Kuch, the Worcester superintendent and former high school principal here, and Ellen Tillapaugh’s husband.
At the Monday, March 31, regular meeting that followed the election, the mayor had nominated Gary Kuch for justice – a position he had run for unsuccessfully earlier in the decade – to allow him to enroll in certification classes that began April 2. He replaced Enid Hinkes.
Those conciliatory steps contrasted with a counter-budget to Booan’s budget that Katz offered at the second budget session since the election, held Wednesday, March 30, in 22 Main.
Earlier, Booan had proposed reducing six FTEs from the village workforce, including Public Works Superintendent Brian Clancy, and reducing Police Chief Diana Nicols to two days a week. That would have freed up $140,000 for street work.
Katz proposed adding those six Full-Time Equivalents back into the budget, and reducing the amount for street repair – a Booan priority – to $70,000.
A village budget must be approved by the end of May.
At noon on the 4th, Katz and the new trustees were sworn in amidst much good will from a mostly Democratic crowd that filled the trustees’ meeting room.
That evening at 6, the organizational went forward politely, with Booan also naming Franck to chair the Economic Sustainability Committee, adjusting former trustee Neil Weiller’s Sustainability Committee to examine the village’s fiscal health as well.
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