Town, village leaders work to keep services continuing
Municipal leaders in Mid-Hudson towns and villages are taking the assault from coronavirus and absence of federal directives personally because of the impact it has on their communities, friends and neighbors.
Guidelines from Ulster County have been followed daily and state mandates, which seem to change by the hour, are being implemented largely without objection. In the week since guidelines have begun to be issued for interactions between the public and local governments, there have been varying degrees of stress.
Saugerties Mayor Bill Murphy on Monday conducted a Village Board meeting at the end of a day filled with a long list of meetings that affected the town of nearly 19,500, including a village of nearly 4,000.
Prior to serving as mayor or Village Board member, Murphy was youth sports organizer, and he said his goal is to encourage people who want to help while helping them avoid burnout.
“I could call 100 volunteers right now and I’d probably get them,” he said. “A month from now, that’s not going to be the case. People are going to be tired and burnt out and frustrated.”
Murphy’s day had consisted of a meeting with school district officials to determine how food will get to low-income families stuck at home; a conference call with other mayors and town supervisors to develop plans for common or unexpected needs; and an Ulster County video conference update helping to coordinate services in response to new information that seems to come almost hourly.
The Saugerties board had yet to adopt its own “social distancing” policy and sat elbow to elbow at a table, but there was a large container of sanitizer in the middle of the group. Other boards were dealing with the crisis in other ways.
In Hurley, Town Board members wore medical gloves while they passed around resolutions that each member had to sign. In Woodstock, chairs were spaced apart, with Supervisor Bill McKenna choreographing people to move if it appeared they were too close together.
McKenna also noted that town employees are working with the county if their positions have become inactive due to closures, such as at the town youth center.
“To a person, everybody’s been great, they’ve been doing what they need to, and frequently, it’s not what they’re employed to do,” he said. “We shut down the youth center and the director ... will be going down to the county to man the (coronavirus information) hotline. Other youth center employees may be helping cleaning, or delivering food.”
Esopus Supervisor Shannon Harris, who is president of the Ulster County Association of Town Supervisors and Mayors, said it is evident that leaders in each municipality has a good “grip” on their own communities, but are also anxious to learn what is working well for other small towns.
“I’m working as hard as I can to keep that group of mayors and supervisors well-connected so that we can share best practices and how we’re adapting to these polices that are coming down from the state and county,” she said.
Harris comes from a background of having worked with a multinational organization helping corporations in Japan recover from the simultaneous 2011 disasters of an earthquake, tidal wave and nuclear plant radiation leak. That background has helped her keep the current crisis from becoming overwhelming and the element of surprise from becoming paralyzing.
“The challenge for supervisors and mayors at this point is insuring that their department heads and the public understand where we are on this curve,” she said. “We are in the beginning and bringing them along with where we are now and where we’re heading in the next week and the week after that.”
Rhinebeck town Supervisor Elizabeth Spinzia said adjusting schedules and developing ways to allow public access to municipal services has become a full-time occupation that has exceeded her other duties.
“I have a great ... relationship with (village Mayor Gary Bassett) in working together, not only on how we’re serving the public in our municipalities, but how we’re going to go beyond that and help our at-risk older population,” she said.
Most officials were reluctant to talk about how their personal lives have been affected by the crisis, but Spinzia noted that she’s also been dealing with how to retrieve her son’s personal items from a college that has been closed.
“My son (and husband) are going down today to pick up all of his belongings,” she said. “We also have a Riverkeeper employee (staying) with us. He was caught between apartments and will be with us for a while.”
It has also gotten personal for Ulster town Supervisor James Quigley, who is in a self-imposed isolation because he and his wife had recently returned from a trip to Mexico and Europe.
Even so, he said his two weeks away from the office is expected to be productive, helping the town avoid losing ground on grants, audits, and oversight of projects.
“What’s clear to me is this is not a two-week exercise; this is going to be a 30- to 60-day process,” he said.
“I’m able to sit here and talk about strategic issues,” he said. “It’s important that we protect our workforce and the public on a dayto-day basis, but we also have to keep the town going, and I have two sewer projects that have grants that expire at the end of April and the end of this year. So there’s operations issues and there’s strategic issues.”