Truth matters.

 Responsive and responsible government cannot be built on lies.

We can see this at the national level and we can see it locally in the town of Berne.

We had high hopes that, with two new appointments to the Berne Town Board, the ship of state would at last be on an even keel.

But our hopes were dashed at this month’s town board meeting.

Three out of the four board members, as reported in our front-page story by Noah Zweifel, voted to enter into a contract with Albany County for ambulance service that will cost the town $225,000.

Normally, this essential and recurring expenditure would be one the town had budgeted for.

But there is nothing normal about Berne governance in recent years.

The town board has now agreed to a contract when it does not have the funds to cover the cost.

New York State Town Law says that a town shall not enter into a contract it has not budgeted for unless funds are transferred to the appropriate account.

We admire the courage and honesty of the sole dissenting board member, Melanie laCour.

“This is a yearly expense,” said laCour at the May meeting, “and you just completely left it out of the budget. All the money in the budget is accounted for. And now you’re saying we’re going to add this on top of it, and you’re not telling me where that money is coming from … I am not going to enter into a contract I know we can’t pay for. That is fraud.”

So how did Berne get here? 

A look back is instructive so that the way forward may better serve the people of Berne.

Three years ago, we wrote on this page, “Residents pay town property taxes to cover the cost of their government and to provide needed services. One of the most basic functions of elected town board members is to oversee responsible handling of the people’s money. Berne has failed in this regard and needs to take immediate steps to rectify the situation.”

That statement followed Zweifel’s coverage of the town’s unpaid electric bills. Equally troubling, the town supervisor, Dennis Palow, and the town board members contacted by Zweifel did not respond to answer his questions on why the bills weren’t paid.

A democratic government is meant to serve the people, and the public deserved answers as to why the money residents paid in taxes was not being used to meet the expenses of something as necessary as electricity.

No answers were forthcoming.

The one town board member who was willing to talk to Zweifel, Albert Thiem, said he was unaware of any issues with the town’s electric bills and asked to see copies of the overdue bills, which we posted on our website.

This followed on the heels of a 2021 audit report from the state comptroller’s office that clearly itemized the duties the Berne Town Board had neglected. The audit covered the entirety of 2020, when Sean Lyons was supervisor and Palow was deputy supervisor.

Worse still, the comptroller’s office found later that the Berne board had followed only one of its 11 recommendations. Bills went unpaid and town funds were sometimes switched from one account to another without board members approving those transactions.

When Republican-backed candidates took control of the board, their strategy was to cut taxes, usually a sure bet with the electorate, drawing down the enormous fund balance built up over decades of Democratic governance. Lyons decreased taxes almost every year since he took office in 2016 and the roughly $3 million town budget for 2022 slashed town property taxes by 88 percent.

According to the state comptroller’s 2023 data, the town reported that it had less than $55,000 in its unassigned fund balance that year, down from nearly $1 million just two years earlier.

In the fall of 2023, the board hiked town taxes by over 700 percent. The stunning move was needed to meet basic expenses.

Then, in August 2024, three board members — Thiem, Leo Vane Jr., and Joe Martin — abruptly quit, saying they had been unable to access information essential to town governance with the breaking point coming when two of them said Palow declined to give them information on town finances.

Martin shared a recording of Palow telling him he wouldn’t show him a “f-cking thing” about the town’s finances.

The resignations left Berne without a functioning town board until the governor finally appointed laCour, a Democrat and a lawyer, to the board in January.

In April, the three board members — Palow, Deputy Supervisor Thomas Doolin, and laCour — appointed a fourth, Joseph Giebelhaus. A Democrat and retired Albany administrator, Giebelhaus is backed by both the Democrats and Republicans in his run for supervisor in November. Palow is not seeking re-election.

Every major post in the town is open. So now is an essential time for Berne citizens to pay attention to their government.

A close look at May’s town board meeting is instructive. LaCour had asked at both the April and May meetings how the town would pay the county for ambulance service when it was not included in the budget.

“Last time, I was told it was sales tax, and then I was told it was not included in the budget because there was no signed contract, but it’s a yearly expense that we knew was going to happen,” laCour said at the May meeting. 

She is correct. The town — that is, what remained of its government: Palow and Doolin — were well aware of the cost for the ambulance service.

The tentative budget Palow submitted last year for 2025 included the ambulance service with a 19-percent tax increase to pay for it. Following public outcry after Zweifel wrote about the second year of tax increases, Palow removed the line for the county’s ambulance service, keeping the levy increase under 2 percent.

Palow said at the time that he wouldn’t sign the contract with the county over disagreements about cost, and claimed that the county would provide ambulance service anyway.

This simply was not true.

County spokeswoman Mary Rozak told The Enterprise at the time that there’s “no mandate that currently exists that this service needs to be provided by the county.”

Sheriff Craig Apple told The Enterprise that each municipality pays its “fair share of the operating costs” for county EMS based on census data.

If Berne didn’t pay its fair share, Apple recommended “withholding sales tax at a minimum.”

Albany County distributes sales tax to municipalities based on census data and, for small towns like Berne that don’t have a robust tax base, the sales-tax money funds a substantial portion of the budget. Nearly half of the $2.6 million Berne budget for this year is to be funded through county sales tax.

At the May meeting of the Berne Town Board, account clerk Andrea Borst was not corrected by any elected official when she falsely claimed that, because Palow did not have a town board to vote on a budget that would pierce the 2-percent state-set tax cap, he could not raise taxes beyond that 2 percent and so could not include ambulance money in the budget and still be able to balance it. 

This simply is not true.

As The Enterprise reported in the midst of the budget development process last year, Palow would have been able to raise the taxes however much he wanted without a board vote, according to the state comptroller’s office.

Palow himself in a  televised Channel 10 interview said, “Because we have no board, my tentative budget will pass for the 2025 budget.”

At the same May meeting, Borst also claimed, again without being corrected by an elected town official, that the expense was not included because the cost for ambulance service could not reasonably be estimated. Borst said that she won’t know the “dollar amount” until the board signs the contract.

This simply is not true.

The $225,000 has been verbally agreed upon, and Berne has paid for ambulance service every year, even when there has been no contract.

To cover the $225,000 that will come due in January — after Palow has retired — Berne plans to use the scant $32,000 that will remain in its fund balance along with the $150,000 windfall it recently got from the sale of Switzkill Farm to Albany County.

That still leaves $43,000 to be paid. And it leaves the town with no reserves.

Since town government wasn’t functional for nearly half a year, we wonder if Palow might contribute some of his $23,000 annual salary or Borst some of her nearly $80,000 salary to close the gap.

In the meantime, we urge elected leaders to be honest with their constituents. And we urge residents to elect leaders they can trust.

We were thrilled this week with the detailed answers we got from an elected McKownville fire commissioner on bids awarded for a new $10 million firehouse.

“Transparency is important to us,” said Commissioner Michael Wren, “and our goal is to continue to keep the residents of McKownville informed every step of the way throughout this exciting project.”

We believe that approach is why the firehouse project passed with 80 percent of the vote.

People are willing to support essential services — like those provided by McKownville’s volunteer firefighters or the sheriff’s paid emergency medical technicians — with their taxes. So, while cutting taxes may seem like a clever political ploy to gain votes, it can have disastrous results as it has in Berne.

A steady hand is needed to guide the ship of state. And in a democracy — a government of the people, by the people, for the people — that requires honesty.