Good news offers road map for city’s future

When I first walked into my office in Monument Square nearly 18 months ago, I found a city squarely in the midst of crisis. I began my job at The Record six days after voters had chosen a new, Democratic mayor and Republican-controlled City Council amid dire concerns that the city — for a second time in a quarter century — was on the verge of going broke. There appeared to many to be little to be done to stop Troy’s plunge into insolvency and a state takeover that has been looming ever since a state control board was given oversight of city finances in the mid-1990s in return for the city being allowed to borrow more than $50 million to keep from growing broke. The succeeding year and a half has been among the most dramatic — and, at times, traumatic — periods I have spent reporting on local government, filled with drama, intrigue, uncertainty and, of course, lots and lots of political posturing. Though I wasn’t here for campaign season, it seems in retrospect that voters wanted a change from business as usual, at least in the mayor’s office, where they chose Patrick Madden, the longtime head of a nonprofit group who pledged to bring honesty back to the city’s finances after years of city officials using bogus numbers to artificially hold down property taxes until the city could no longer reach into its reserves to cover the resulting annual deficits. At the same time, voters chose a City Council that also included several political neophytes whose only pledged allegiance was to those taxpayers, as well as a few familiar faces who made similar pledges to fortce the city to start doing things differently. What followed has had more twists and turns than a David Baldacci novel, specifically as Madden has butted heads with the council majority, led by a veteran politician, Carmella Mantello, who had already served two previous stints on the council and had twice run unsuccessfully for mayor.

The result has been a dramatic contrast in political styles, with the mayor sticking to his campaign pledge of honest budgeting without any of the past gimmicks that kept taxpayers happy in the short-term but set them up for the big comeuppance that greeted them at the end of 2016 in the form of a 14.5 percent tax hike that was accompanied by deep cuts in city services and followed by the wailing and gnashing of teeth of those who wanted services such as the city’s two municipal swimming pools restored no matter what the cost.

While it’s still at least six months before anybody can declare victory, at least at the polls, two noteworthy stories over the past couple weeks seem to at least have shifted things in Madden’s favor just as campaign season is about to begin once again for what will be seven seats on a council that was reconstituted through changes to the city Charter approved by voters at the same time they elected Madden and the council.

First came news that local developer Sonny Bonacio, who already has undertaken many rehab projects in downtown Troy (and is, in fact, our landlord here in the River Triangle Building), was teaming up with Bow Tie Cinemas to try to duplicate the magic they pulled off in downtown Saratoga Springs by building a nine-screen cineplex at One Monument Square. The former site of City Hall had already seen three prospective developers come and go, but the commitment by Bonacio and Bow Tie indicates the days of political intrigue are over, at least as far as that project is concerned.

Then, last week, Madden dropped a bombshell at the beginning of a City Council Finance Committee meeting at which Republicans were ready to tear into a year-end financial report that showed the city actually finished the year with a surplus of more than $2 million. Those knives lost much of their sharpness, though, when the mayor an- nounced that Moody’s Investor Services, the worldwide authority in analyzing municipal finances, had upgraded its outlook on the city’s finances from “negative” to “stable.”

While the city’s A2 bond rating was unchanged, few could have expected anyone — especially an authority such as Moody’s — to describe the city as fiscally stable. The agency went one step further, though, and specifically cited steps Madden had taken to clean up the city’s books as the main reason for the improved outlook.

So, in the span of less than a month, Madden’s new way of doing business had been essentially endorsed by two groups that will continue to play crucial roles in the city’s renaissance: the developers who we are relying on to continue investing in the city’s future and the financiers — both public and private — who control the purse strings for future borrowing that will be necessary to continue molding the vision of Troy in the 21st century. Does that mean the city is out of the woods and doesn’t have to pinch its pennies anymore? Not by a long shot, but it does mean the people whose opinions matter almost as much as voters think the city is finally on the right path. It means that truthful budgeting and difficult decisions — as well as the will to stand behind those decisions no matter how unpopular they may be in some corners — are better for the city’s future than pandering to the loudest voices and giving them what they want.

As we launch into the new campaign season, voters need to ask themselves who they want to listen to and if doing so is simply a case of choosing the same tired politics and expecting a different outcome for the city. Those who hold a good chunk of the city’s future in their hands have already weighed in; voters will get their say again on Nov. 7, only this time, given the happenings of the past 18 months, they will only have themselves to blame if they ignore their own eyes and ears and choose to go back to what got them in the mess they’re just starting to dig out of.