Town Finances So Far Not Too Badly Impacted by Virus Crisis
by Alex Brooks
At the Petersburgh Town Board meeting on June 15, Supervisor Smith gave an update on the Town’s revenue for this year. He said the mortgage tax revenue is pretty much on track, and it’s possible that it won’t be too badly affected by the coronavirus crisis. The Sales Tax revenue will certainly be affected but the loss of revenue may not be too bad. The first check received this year, for the fourth quarter of 2019, was for 43% of the budgeted amount. The second check which will be coming soon will be for the 1st quarter of 2020, so it shouldn’t be too far below normal. The third check, for the second quarter of 2020, will certainly be lower, and it’s possible that the final check for this year, for the 3rd quarter of 2020, may see some kind of a rebound.
Smith also said the Town has heard from the State on the subject of CHIPs money. The good news is that the Town’s CHIPs allotment is $117,388, only a little less than expected, and the bad news is that the State still reserves the right to reduce that amount later in the year by as much as 20%.
In this, as in school budgets, everything depends on whether Congress passes a bill to help state governments with the budget-busting effects of the Covid pandemic.
Emerging Contaminants Grant
Tom Suozzo of Cedarwood Engineering said most of the work has been done on this grant project, in which engineers looked at geology maps of the area in the vicinity of the water tank to try to guess where to sink a well where there would be a good chance of finding abundant water and if possible far enough away from the PFOA plume coming from the Taconic plant to have little or no PFOA in the water. Suozzo said a draft report of the engineer’s findings will be ready in about 45 days.
Summer Picnic
Heinz Noeding said the Park And Recreation Committee decided it was not feasible to hold the annual Memorial Day picnic, but was planning instead to hold a community gathering at the Town Park on Saturday August 22. He said it would have to be organized differently than such events have been done in the past, in order to make it safe for the era of the pandemic. There will two tents so that there will be enough room to maintain social distance, and there will be no pot luck – the organizers will provide food. Noeding said the committee will work on making all the arrangements so that the picnic will not be an occasion for spreading disease, but before investing a lot of work into making plans for the picnic, he asked the Board if it approved the idea of holding the picnic. The Board said it sounds like a nice idea, and urged the committee to continue planning.
Mowing Cemeteries
The Board opened bids for mowing of the cemeteries. These are for mowing six cemeteries once a month from now until October. There were three bids, and the low bidder was David’s Lawn Care with a total price for the season of $2,400. This was said to be $400 more than was budgeted, and there was talk once again of whether the Town should mow all six of the cemeteries and why those particular ones were chosen and whether they needed to be mowed every month. Tom Berry said because it is late in the season and the Town has a bid in hand, he believes the Board should just accept the bid and get the mowing started without any further delay. He said deliberative consideration of which cemeteries should be mowed and how often would be a good thing, but should be aimed at next season. The Board eventually agreed and it accepted the bid from David’s Lawn Care.
Someone had brought to the meeting copies of a paper written by David Fleming, an Albany attorney with expertise in cemetery law who is also the Supervisor of the Town of Nassau. It says that public cemeteries that were run by non-profits and are now abandoned must be taken over by the town and maintained to varying degrees depending on whether they are first, second, or third class cemeteries. But religious cemeteries, family cemeteries, and private cemeteries are excluded from this requirement. The key point seems to be that if a cemetery sold plots to the public with the expectation that they would be cared for in perpetuity, the cemetery cannot then be abandoned and neglected just because the cemetery association went broke and could not fulfill its obligations for perpetual care.
The last time attempts were made to list all of the cemeteries in Petersburgh the group found something like fifty or sixty of them, almost all of which are family cemeteries and a great many of which are not being mowed or maintained. Most are on private property and many are not near roads or have access problems of one kind or another. There were a number of people, both on the Board and in the audience, who expressed some interest in working on a cemetery committee to look into all of this, and hope was expressed that they could enlist the help of Town Historian Peter Schaaphok for such a project, but no formal committee was constituted.
Planning Board
Around the beginning of this year it was discovered that the Petersburgh Planning Board had not been properly established under NY State Law when it was created thirty or forty years ago, and therefore it needed rather urgently to be established in a lawful way so that it could continue to do its work. Somehow this didn’t get done in the first two months of the year, and then became a back-burner issue because of the Covid-19 crisis. Tom Berry said anything the Planning Board does at this point is under a cloud of illegitimacy, and the Town needs to deal with the issue immediately. The Board scheduled a special meeting for Monday, June 29 at 7:45 pm at the PVMCC to discuss this. They hope to have the Planning Board also attend this meeting.
Highway Local Law
The Town’s insurance provider asked the Town Board to pass a local law requiring that written notice be sent to the Town of any road defects before the Town will be responsible for any damage caused by said road defects. This is a way for the Town to reduce its liability for any hazardous conditions that may develop on Town roads, and the Board said it sounds like a good idea. Town attorney David Gruenberg said he will draft a law for the Board’s consideration at its July meeting.
In other business:
• The Board passed a resolution allowing the bookkeeper to pay certain bills by the due dates and have the vouchers signed after the checks are signed, so that recurrent problems with late payments and late fees can be fixed.
• The highway committee reported that acting Highway Superintendent Adam Beaudry would like to hire an additional highway worker, as the town crew has been working shorthanded for quite some time. The board said that was fine, and in fact the Highway Superintendent generally can do his own hiring and firing without consulting the Town Board.
• The Town Board appointed Sharon Springer to the Library Board of Trustees on the recommendation of the Library Board. She fills a vacancy left by the departure of Daisy Manchester.