Back by populist demand

I may not be exaggerating too much when I say nobody is more glad than I to see 2017 turn to 2018. The past year was a difficult one in the Robarge household, in large part due to health problems I continue to battle, both physically and emotionally. Things I was able to do as an eager young reporter no longer come easy, if at all, and I don’t like it. I made a lot of allowances for these issues in 2017, including giving up my beloved column, in which I tried to offer my own humorously caustic take on the news of the day around the Collar City. To those who asked — and I was pleasantly surprised to hear there were more than a few — I said I was taking a hiatus and planned to bring it back once I had things under control — both professionally and personally. Well, thanks to some good doctors, a very supportive wife and children and a boss who couldn’t be a better friend, it’s that time again. As we head into a new era of politics in Troy, I couldn’t think of a better time to sharpen my keyboard once again and take aim at the powers that be in City Hall. Before we look ahead, though, let’s take a few hundred words to look back. I joined The Record in November 2015, in the midst of what may have been the most-bizarre ending to a City Council’s twoyear term. There was a budget impasse between outgoing Democratic Mayor Lou Rosamilia and the Democratic-controlled council that was essentially resolved in a compromise both sides agreed was done essentially to kick the issue into the laps of the new, Republican- controlled council and new Democratic Mayor Patrick Madden. There was also the revelation of a “secret” agreement between Rosamilia and Robert Fitzgerald, then-president of the Troy

Police Benevolent Association, that provided lifetime health insurance coverage to a former officer who was sent to prison after he admitted to tipping off a local drug gang. Faced with the possibility of a lawsuit by the PBA, the council begrudgingly accepted the deal.

I said back then I didn’t think a political term could end more bizarrely. Fast forward two years, to this past December, and I was proven wrong. After a term marked by often-bitter divisions that crossed all party lines, the council majority and the Madden administration brought it all to a crescendo in negotiations on a 2018 city budget. One year after offering a proposal with a tax increase of nearly 25 percent — later pared back to 14.5 percent after heated negotiations that ran about two weeks past the charter-imposed deadline to have a budget in place — Madden presented a spending plan with a tax hike that was less than a state tax cap of less than 2 percent.

To do so, however, the mayor proposed replacing the current $29-per-year, per-residential-unit recycling fee with a $190-ayear solid waste disposal charge designed to cover the estimated $2.9 million cost of municipal trash disposal. Without that fee, the budget would have called for a tax increase in the neighborhood of last year’s 14.5 percent, and Republican opponents, led by council President Carmella Mantello, came to refer to the fee as a “hidden tax.”

Madden defended the fee as needed to help the city combat a pitiful recycling rate of 5 percent — about 20 percent of the state average — and was being done in conjunction with a proposed solid waste management plan he said would help the city prepare what are expected to be sharply increasing costs as available landfill space continues to decline rapidly. Republicans chose instead to either oppose the mayor’s plan outright or back a proposal developed by Republican Councilman Mark McGrath and former corporation counsel Kevin Glasheen that included a so-called “pay-as-you-throw” model instead of the mayor’s proposed flat fee, arguing that charging people based on how much they dispose of was more likely to encourage them to reduce the city’s waste stream through recycling, composting and other methods by allowing them to share in the savings.

The impasse again rolled past the Dec. 1 budget deadline, coming to an end only when Madden agreed to reduce the fee to $160 and agreed that it be used only in 2018. Madden admitted a pay-as-you-throw fee would be the likely replacement after the management plan is completed, and three of the opponents of the initial proposal — lame duck Republicans Dean Bodnar and John Donohue and Democrat Erin Sullivan-Teta — threw their support around the compromise, giving Madden the votes to withstand the often-angry opposition of the council’s GOP leadership.

The trio said it was their responsibility to have a balanced budget in place before they left office and specifically criticized the Republican leadership for failing to supplement its opposition to the trash fee with an alternative budget proposal. While their opposition made perfect po- litical sense, Mantello and her Republican comrades shot themselves in the foot by not offering anything beyond opposition, bolstering a reputation as obstructionists to Madden’s agenda.

Mantello, though, made a valid point in defense that she and her fellow Republicans were blindsided by the proposal, getting no advance notice before Madden unveiled his budget in early October. Mantello has been a frequent critic of what she calls a lack of openness and transparency in City Hall, and, in this case, at least, she does have a point.

While I can understand the logic of not giving an obstructionist opposition a head start, I’m not so sure it would have been smarter politically to instead get a head start on negotiations that didn’t even truly begin until the Dec. 1 budget deadline had passed for a second straight year without a valid budget in place. If Madden had come out in July and said he was developing a budget that would include a trash fee, it would have given time for McGrath and the mayor to work out a plan that served both masters by including an immediate pay- as-you-throw program.

The administration would also have done better than to not withhold a letter from the state board overseeing the city’s finances in which the city was all but promised a reduction in the debt it still carried on about $25 million in bonds issued by the state in the mid-1990s to bail the city out of a historic fiscal crisis, but on the condition that the city implement a balanced budget that did not exceed the state tax cap.

All this is academic, obviously, but does it offer any insight into how life will be in a Democratic-controlled City Hall? That remains to be seen. It could loosen lips once constrained by a now-politically neutered opposition, or it could empower the building of a Cuomolike empire that ruthlessly controls the message out of the fifth floor of the Hedley Park Place building.

Mantello spoke frequently over the past two years of the need for “checks and balances” in city government, but while a lot of that was little more than political bluster at the time, it couldn’t more accurately describe her role in leading the council from the minority. She may have little power to override the mayor’s political agenda, but she has the voice to hold Madden to the promises he made to voters in 2015 and throughout a difficult first two years in office.

The next two years offer some critical challenges to the city, most notably negotiations with all six of its labor unions. With a history pocked with incidents like the secret Rosamilia-Fitzpatrick deal, the city has a well-earned reputation for giving away the store in labor negotiations, so Mantello — who is, ironically, the aunt of new PBA leader Nick Laviano — could play a valuable role as the loyal opposition, making sure taxpayers get the best deal possible.

And so, let the games begin again. I’ll be sitting here on the sideline, keeping the world safe from democracy.