Westerlo Town Board is trying to get around public say on building projects
To the Editor:
The Westerlo Town Board met on Jan. 19 as the Building Committee. This committee is supposed to provide recommendations to the town board on building-related matters, which now have to do with the town hall and highway garage. Despite several requests to open this committee to interested and knowledgeable citizens of Westerlo, the town board has kept this responsibility to itself.
Townspeople attending the meeting found the town board at the front table in their usual spots, with their “Councilman” nameplates in front of them, and two employees of Delaware Engineering and the town attorney seated facing the town board and away from the public.
At the very beginning of the meeting, Mr. [William] Bichteman declared there would be no questions or other input from the public, so we all sat there for the next two hours, straining to hear the conversations up front in what was supposed to be a public meeting.
Despite this barrier to public awareness of, let alone participation in, this important topic, it was possible to hear much of what went on. Here are just a few of the more interesting things.
Despite this officially not being a meeting of the town board, Mr. Bichteman asked Ms. [Aline] Galgay, the town attorney, to discuss methods of financing. What we were able to piece together from what we could hear of her lengthy tutorial to the town board and to Delaware Engineering was advice on how to break up a multi-million-dollar project of the sort previously rejected by Westerlo residents into “five-year projects,” each of which would be below some specific six-figure dollar amount and thus, apparently from Ms. Galgay’s comments, not subject to a permissive referendum.
Simply stated, the town attorney was advising the town board and its apparent vendor of choice on how to impose this big project on Westerlo taxpayers without their consent.
Mr. Bichteman began the meeting by working through a list of issues associated with the town hall and highway garage, stating he was looking for alternatives to the previously rejected multi-million-dollar project proposed by Delaware Engineering. However, near the end of the meeting, he tasked Delaware Engineering with determining the best options for both structures, and Fred from Delaware Engineering repeated his comments in support of the rejected project, so we can predict what Delaware Engineering will come up with.
Mr. Bichteman also (apparently; again it was difficult to hear what was being said) asked Delaware Engineering to prepare the request for proposals for the needed work, saying he wasn’t competent to do this. As previously pointed out to the town board, this compounds the conflict of interest resulting from having Delaware Engineering, which the town board has been paying to advise it, then be paid to define the work and write the RFP, then be paid to carry out the work.
The town board is using our tax money to pay a vendor to bake itself into the building project.
On this last point, what is needed at this juncture is for the town to issue an RFP requesting bids to provide a workable and reliable town hall, highway garage, and justice court by any approach each bidder chooses to suggest, not just the approach proposed by Delaware Engineering, but with emphasis on cost effectiveness and staging or phasing of work so each piece can be done successfully before having the same vendor do more.
This RFP could and should be prepared by Ed Lawson, our deeply experienced and practical code enforcement officer, who patiently attempted to explain to Mr. Bichteman that it would first be necessary to determine what work would be done on the town hall before writing an RFP for abating the town hall’s asbestos.
This common-sense approach would free the town board from its current helpless (and expensive) dependence on Delaware Engineering, and would free Westerlo taxpayers from having either to accept and pay for Delaware Engineering’s big project or do without any organized and effective way to provide a workable and reliable town hall, highway garage, and justice court.
Delaware Engineering knows only one way to do this, and that’s already been rejected. It’s also not even something for which the actual price is known; this was clear from Delaware Engineering’s statement that it hasn’t yet done (and been paid for by us) the “design phase,” and by the occasionally audible comments from the town board about how the actual price might be higher than the already-rejected $2.75 million.
As their representative once again said at this recent meeting, the town board decided $2.75 million was affordable, then paid Delaware Engineering to provide a sketch of how the $2.75 million might be spent.
Particularly in light of Ms. Galgay’s lengthy advice to the town board and to Delaware Engineering on how to spend this kind of money without the nuisance of a permissive referendum (how dare Westerlo taxpayers want to have any say on how much tax money they’re to provide the town board!), this boils down to major involuntary taxation for a highly questionable project.
The Westerlo Town Board’s refusal to open the Building Committee to townspeople, or to hear from townspeople at its meetings, or to permit taxpayers to vote on a major tax item, is the latest indication the town board won’t permit government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Leonard Laub
Westerlo