Mayor disputes contention that village under fiscal stress

ELLENVILLE, N.Y. >> Mayor Jeff Kaplan says an incorrectly filed financial report is the reason the village is on the state comptroller’s latest list of New York municipalities under “moderate fiscal stress.”

Kaplan said a reserve fund was used to advance a village capital project but the expense was listed on a state form without a source of revenue being cited.

“We have a ... project going on to find a new water source and to repair old pipes,” the mayor said. “That entails a loan from EFC (the state Environmental Facilities Corp.) in the range of some $6 million. As part of the EFC review of our finances, they insisted that we pay down some of our debt in the Water Department, and in order to do that, we made a drawdown from our ‘mountain money.’”

Village voters in 2015 approved spending $1.2 million from the $3.2 million in an account established when the village sold about 4,000 acres in the Ice Caves Mountain and Minnewaska area to the Open Space Institute in 2002.

“We used it to buy some equipment and we used it to pay down the water debt,” Kaplan said. “That $1.2 million was not reflected in the report because it’s not considered revenue because it came from another fund of ours. When they (state official) determined fiscal stress, they showed us at over a million dollars more in expenses than in revenue, when, in fact, we didn’t have that . ...

“At the end of the day, we’re really not in financial stress,” he said.

“I have a feeling that, in one of their forms, there’s a place where you’re supposed to show that you got it from a reserve that our treasurer probably didn’t show them,” Kaplan said. “What they said to us is that it’s too late to correct any forms.”

The village of Catskill has been classified by the state as “susceptible to fiscal stress.” Officials there did not return a reporter’s phone message.