What does the supervisor expect to gain by encouraging his supporters in such rude behavior, or by turning down a chance for a large grant?

To the Editor:

The February Knox Town Board meeting was pure theater, and would have been funny if the results hadn’t very likely destroyed any chance the town of Knox has to get a large grant that would have benefited the town and its employees.

Although this has been in The Enterprise before, it needs to be spelled out again.  NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) is offering four grants to Knox-sized towns in this area, grants up to $100,000.  Competition for the money is based on the speed with which a town can complete at least four of 10 “action items” defined by NYSERDA.  Knox has completed three of the items, the work having been done by a small group of volunteers; there has been a lot of work, with the majority done by town board member Amy Pokorny.

Knox is currently in the lead in the competition and time is critical. One item of the four remains to be done.  One of the possible actions involves putting an electric-vehicle charging station in town.

The EV charging station is the only action over which the town has control of the timing. Two other possibilities were discussed: specialized training for the town building inspector, or changing the town streetlights to LEDs [light-emitting diodes].

In the case of the lights, which are owned by National Grid, it could well take years. It's not economical to put changing out a few lights in a small town ahead of larger towns with many more lights, while training for the building inspector is entirely dependent upon building being undertaken in Albany.  Again, the town of Knox has no control over the timing of these two items. It could be many months or not; any estimate is just a guess.

The installation of an electric-vehicle charging station is different. If the town board had passed the motion, it’s likely that the station could have been up and running in under a month. Amy had written a grant proposal and the town received a grant to pay for all but 20 percent of the cost.

Money to pay for the trenching could have come from an earlier award, given for the completion of another action item, the standardization of requirements for solar installations. This grant is only available for a charging station, not for any other purpose.

At the previous month’s meeting, the town board had voted to have Amy apply for a grant for the charging station. Somehow she got it done and won the award in less than a month, a remarkable feat. A month later, when she made a motion to go ahead with the charging station, which, I repeat, could, with very high probability, have led to a large grant to the town, no one seconded the motion.

Instead of considering what is best for the town, the board caved to the most unruly and uninformed crowd I have ever seen at a public meeting. The charging station may not be the most needed thing in town, but only a few in the audience seemed to grasp the idea that it was a step on the way to getting something that would have been good for the town, a step required by NYSERDA. He who has the money calls the tune.

Even though the grant money is going to be spent and some New York towns will benefit, it appears Knox won't be one of them.

One man in the back seemed to be incensed that his money, his tax money, would be used. (He seemed to have only a rudimentary grasp of the situation. His other rant was about global warming and climate change, and how the ozone hole was apparently a hoax as it was closing. The Montreal Protocol to ban chlorofluorocarbons, and the expectation that the ozone layer will not return to normal for another 25, years hadn’t penetrated.  Or, like so much else, he chose to ignore it.)

He started a chant, “We don't want it. We don't want it,” picked up by others and referring to the $100,000 grant! I hope that’s remembered when taxes go up to pay for repairs that could have been covered by this grant, or for the energy used to heat buildings that could have been insulated. “Biting off your nose to spite your face” is the only phrase I can think of that covers the situation.

Supervisor Vasilios Lefkaditis ignored the fact that NYSERDA is sponsoring these grants because it does research and is interested in collecting data from the charging station — following two years of data collection, the town could do anything it likes with the station, including selling it.

I fail to see what it is that the supervisor expects to gain by encouraging his supporters in such behavior, or by turning down a chance for a large grant that doesn’t need matching funds from the town.  

Maybe we will get lucky and one of the other action items will be completed in time. That would be great.  But hoping for luck seems a poor way to run a town.  

One additional thing. Supervisor Lefkaditis read a letter, supposedly written by someone in Buffalo.  (Many of the letters in The Enterprise that have supported Lefkaditis have also been written by people from other places, Berne being the latest; still others have been written by people he employed.)

This was an evil, inflammatory, and defamatory letter. A more mature and sensible person — one whose primary interest wasn’t inciting his supporters — would have said he’d gotten a letter, and that the author was against the charging station. Instead he read it in its entirety, which included calling Amy Pokorny a liar, an unspeakable slur.

It was the perfect illustration of the tone of the meeting.  His supporters cheered. I strongly suspect this group would have been against airports, medical research, and development of the internet.

I wonder how many of the shouters at the meeting have done volunteer work for the town. I wonder how many, including Supervisor Lefkaditis, have the best interests of the town at heart. And I wonder why the town board let this opportunity pass.

Dee Woessner

Knox

Editor’s note: Dee Woessner is a member of the Knox Conservation Advisory Council.

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