RENSSELAERVILLE — The town board race in Rensselaerville this year — the first that’s been contested since 2017 — features incumbent Brian Wood, who’s seeking re-election and has backing by both the Republican and Democratic Parties; former highway superintendent and town board member Randall Bates, who is backed by the Republican Party; and Patricia Byrnes, a sociologist and political newcomer who’s been endorsed by the Democratic Party. 

Wood and Bates each also have the conservative Party line.

Rensselaerville, according to the Albany County Board of Elections, has 1,455 enrolled voters: 595 Democrats, 373 Republicans, 63 Conservatives, 6 Working Families Party members, and 3 Green Party members. The remaining 415 are not registered with a party.

Each of the town board candidates spoke this week about three topics chosen by The Enterprise — the quality of water in the Rensselaerville hamlet, townwide internet accessibility, and whether they think a townwide revaluation is necessary to equalize the tax burden among residents — and explained their own goals should they win a seat on the town board for the next four years. 

Patricia Byrnes 

Patricia Byrnes moved to Rensselaerville seven years ago from Long Island, where she was a sociology professor and worked for nonprofits that dealt with violence against women. Currently, she owns land that she hopes to turn into a medicinal herb farm so that she can supply local herbalists and also provide a space for agricultural education. 

Her desire to participate in an area she fell in love with helped her to decide to run for office this year, she told The Enterprise, and she thinks her background would be a unique benefit to the town. 

“The most important thing for me is that I will be the only woman on the board,” she said. “Not that there haven’t been women on the board before … but, for me, it’s about making sure that women’s interests and, perhaps, needs are met in any way that they possibly can be through a town board government.”

Byrnes had noted during a recent town board meeting that discussion was “very oriented toward what’s going on, but there was nothing about women. Literally nothing.”

She stressed that she’s not looking to focus solely on women’s issues and has no desire to push aside men’s perspectives, but she simply wants to introduce a “different way of thinking about things.”

One related initiative she’s thought up — and is going to pursue regardless of whether she wins a seat on the board — is getting a mobile mammogram vehicle to visit the town once a year and to do local outreach to encourage residents to use it.

“For five years, starting in 2018 until this year, I was trained as a [Centers for Disease Control] diabetes prevention and lifestyle coach and worked for a not-for-profit in Hudson doing that for people with disabilities,” Byrnes explained. 

She also mentioned that she grew up in a working-class family — her father was a track maintenance worker for the New York City subway system, and had five daughters. Combined with her background in sociology, “I have this ability to hear and talk to people no matter who they are and where they come from,” she said.

Regarding the problem of the town’s aging water system, which has led to high levels of regulated chemicals that occur as a byproduct of the disinfection process, Byrnes said the town’s role is to receive grant money that may be helpful for the Rensselaerville Water and Sewer Advisory Committee as it develops a solution. 

“People who are residents of the [hamlet] and need this water system repaired can’t write a grant proposal and be the recipients unless they’re … at the executive level of a not-for-profit,” she said.

Byrnes said that the current town board had expressed an openness to supporting the advisory committee at a recent meeting, and that she would continue this support and “surely be someone who would encourage more discussion.” 

While support for the water district is widespread, getting people on board with the work that would be required to expand broadband may be trickier, she said, based on her own experiences with residents. 

Byrnes said she had once been paid by the Carey Institute to investigate broadband solutions for the town, but she “met more than a few people who did not even want it mentioned in front of them.” 

The issue for them, she said, was the visual impact they felt any necessary poles and wires might have near their homes. She said it struck her as “disingenuous” for people with otherwise progressive values to deny for others what she views as a basic right to internet access. 

Byrnes said it was something she would address with the community “carefully” without “being disingenuous myself.”

As for revaluation, Byrnes said it was something she’s “really going to investigate.”

“Are all those houses on Main Street and Route 145 owned by the people living in them, and what does it mean for them to have their taxes increased?” she asked. “Because we’re not talking about a very wealthy group of people who can afford it … but I don’t know about the minute details of revaluation and what that means for the people who might be priced out.”

Randall Bates

Before serving as the town’s highway superintendent for a decade, Randall Bates had served on the town board and was involved in the committee that redrafted the town’s zoning law in 1995. 

He’s running for town board because, he said, “I continue to have interest in the town, and I have a lot of experience.” 

Bates said he still follows town meetings online and in person, and speaks with residents about what concerns they may have. 

One of those concerns, which he shares, is the overall financial viability of a town that has virtually no commercial base and relies on public money, either from local property taxes or the county sales-tax distribution. As highway superintendent, he was responsible for a major portion of the town’s multi-million dollar budgets over the years. 

“I can contribute to the town board with the knowledge I have about budgeting and highways and so forth,” Bates said. 

One issue he felt strongly about back when he was with the highway department, and which was highlighted with the recent flooding that closed a town road this week, is the state of the town’s infrastructure.

“We use the term ‘hardening the infrastructure,’” he said of the concept of reinforcing things like roads and so on, “and I think instead of hardening, I think we need to reimagine it.”

One idea, Bates said, would be to increase the use of drainage easements on people’s properties so that water is dissipated before it hits the town’s roads.

“These drainage systems and these roads were built primarily in the 1950s and 1960s,” he explained. “Many times, they’re no longer adequate and you keep going back and doing the same repairs over and over again, but we’re limited in what we can do unless we change the nature of the drainage.”

Of the town’s drinking-water problems, Bates said that the town board is limited in what it can do for the system because of the separation between the general fund and water district. The town can, however, offer use of personnel. 

“So, you know, the town attorney,” he said as an example. “The town clerk, Vicki [Kraker], is very helpful to the water board. John Dolce, the supervisor, is very helpful. I would fully support the town board using any and all resources to help the water board.”

As for the internet problem, Bates said the town board should play a “very, very large role” in getting a service expansion. 

“The town really needs to step up and review its agreement with Mid-Hudson Cable giving them the franchise,” he said. “I don’t see them having any real expansion of their network.”

Pointing to Greene County’s recent investment into broadband expansion, Bates said, “It’s doable, and we need to do it, and we need to get it done immediately.”

When it comes to property values, he feels that there should be a professional analysis done to determine the extent of the issue, but he doesn’t think it’s a pressing issue for the town based on his own observations.

The numbers, he said, can be startling, and show “we’re way below where we should be, but that’s across the board. You have to look at disparities. I don’t see great disparities.”

“We’ve had good assessors,” Bates went on. “Now we have one assessor, [who’s] very competent. I would have to be convinced that there’s a real need for reassessment. I think our property values are quite accurate as they exist right now.” 

Brian Wood

Brian Wood was first appointed to the town board in 2019, to fill a vacancy after former Supervisor Steve Pfleging resigned after being accused of stealing from the town, for which he was later convicted.

Wood, who works as director of the Albany County Sheriff’s Emergency Medical Services unit, ran for a full four-year term later that year in an uncontested election, and had previously been a member of the town’s zoning board. 

Asked why he’s seeking re-election, Wood said, “I feel the town is running smoothly. We all click … You don’t see the drama you have going on in other towns.”

If there were more infighting, he said, he’d have little desire to continue the job, but with the way things are now, things get done, and residents seem to respect the board. 

“There’s concerns from time to time, and we try to navigate through those concerns well,” Wood said. “That’s kind of the meat-and-potatoes of it for me.”

If re-elected, Wood hopes to promote participation in the town, including in paid positions, which he acknowledges would mean raising salaries so that the town can attract quality staff. 

He compared the salary of highway workers to workers at Cumberland Farms, a gas station and convenience store, highlighting the difference in skill required for each job. 

“People complain because we try to get the town clerk's salary up because she’s working for next to nothing,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the costs for volunteer fire departments are going up with increased training requirements, which means foregoing new equipment as they try to keep tax rates at a reasonable level, Wood said.

“I just think that people need to be more involved in the town to understand the challenges that you have,” he said. “Twenty years ago, if we had a vacancy in the town highway, there’d be 15 applications. Now, we have a vacancy, you can’t fill it, because nobody wants the job. People will think that’s fine because we save money, and it is, until the snowstorm comes and nobody can plow your road because we don’t have anybody around to do it.”

Like the other candidates, Wood said that the town’s water board deserves full support from the town board, but said that the town’s size makes navigating the problem difficult. 

“As I’ve said in a bunch of town board meetings, I don’t want to be in the public-water business or the public-sewer business,” he said. “Nobody does, and nobody has time for that, because we’re just a little, tiny town board. If you do get into it, you’re going to have to have somebody that you hire to oversee it … and then it becomes super expensive for those 80 people that own their homes [in the district].”

Simply abandoning it, which he said has been suggested before, isn’t an option because people aren’t equipped to find another source of water, and it would take a toll on their quality of life and property values. 

Wood said that it’s fine to hope that a grant is found to cover the cost of an overhaul, but that grants are competitive, and “we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket.”

The committee’s chairman, Ed Csukas, has been “on fire” leading the committee toward a solution, Wood said, and it’s the town board’s “job to support him as best we can.”

He brought up the fact that the committee is made up of volunteers, and that “if you’re doing something for nothing, and I make it extremely difficult for you to do it, what incentive is there for you to do that job?”

When it comes to internet in the town, Wood said that it’s a “delicate situation” because “everybody should have it. It’s the way of the future, right? … Everybody wants it, but they don’t want to have to sacrifice for it.”

He recalled the effort by the county sheriff to install a cell tower in town to improve communications between emergency service units, which led to a “big outcry.”

“Like, oh, we don’t want to ruin our vistas, we don’t want to ruin the scenery, but we want internet,” he said. “If we had good cell-phone coverage out here, everybody would have internet because they can use it on their phone.” 

Wood said he thinks the town should make efforts to expand service, but that the solution will inevitably be expensive, and that should be mindful that that’s part of the price of living in a remote area.

“I own a home in Tennessee now, and land taxes in Tennessee are very miniscule,” he said. “But you wait forever for an ambulance. You wait forever for a fire truck. You wait forever for a police car. But you know that going into it. You’re buying an area in remote Tennessee.”

Wood said that property revaluation is not a topic he’s an expert in — “I’m good at common-sense things, I’m good at reading laws and seeing the loopholes in them” — but that, similar to Bates, he’s not sure what urgency there is for it. 

“Not enough people complain about it,” he said. “People just pay their taxes. If you’re a New Yorker, you just accept that you have a crapload of tax.”

The whole system of property valuation and the resulting tax rate is, he thinks, too complicated for people to bother with. Also, he said, Supervisor John Dolce has done “such a great job with the budget” that people aren’t seeing tax rates go up, further driving it down 

“I do think that it needs to get done, I’m just not sure what the process is,” he said. “The people need to get more involved and say [what they want] . They just become willing.”