Public Comment On Woodbury Town Supervisor Pay Raise is TONIGHT

The meeting is scheduled for 7:30pm at Woodbury Town Hall

Tonight, there is a public comment period scheduled concerning the proposed pay increase for the Woodbury Town Supervisor, Kathryn Luciani.

The meeting is scheduled for 7:30pm at Woodbury Town Hall and the public comment period for Introductory Local Law 1 of 2024 – Increase Salary of Supervisor, is up first.

How a Town Supervisor — barely a month on the job and without any sort of defined agenda — can ask for an increase is a little ridiculous.

I don’t oppose pay increases for government employees and our elected officials. 

One of the reasons we have a hard time finding good candidates is the small pay. 

Another reason we get corrupt politicians is because they have outside business interests that they bring with them to their government job — usually stemming from past employment but, in a lot of cases, future employment opportunities.

That said …

In this specific case, there are a couple of additional factors to consider:

The Village of Woodbury and Town of Woodbury are set up in such a way that the duties of a typical Town Supervisor are split between the Village Mayor and Town Supervisor.

For example: 

The Village Mayor, Andrew Giacomazza, is responsible for the following: The Building Department (including Planning and Zoning, the Highway Department (which manages the roads), the Fire Department, and the Water and Sewer Department.

Town Supervisor Luciani is responsible for: The Animal shelter, the parks department, the Senior Center, the assesor’s office, and the Library. The Town also has a small building and grounds department for maintenance of Town buildings and the parks.

The Town Supervisor also works in conjunction with the Police department and Courts, although those specific units are mostly-self governing. For example, Chief Kevin Watson runs the police department. The Town’s involvement is more or less budgetary.

The Library is a bit of a confusing issue since one building in the Library unit is owned by the Library itself, and the other is owned by the Town. The two governing bodies continue to fight over the town owned building, as evident from Maria Hunter’s comments at the Town Board meeting on January 18th. The Library, according to Hunter, continues to say in their meeting minutes that the Town of Woodbury is not cooperating with them.

In other towns in the state, the Town Supervisor would be responsible for all of these departments, not some.

No Agenda

The other thing to consider is, at the time of this writing, the Town Supervisor has presented no agenda on how the board plans to address the numerous issues facing both the town and village. 

Since the departments are split between town and village, the two governing bodies need to work in concert; however, what’s happening right now is the Town Board is claiming the Village Board is somehow preventing them from getting anything done, but simultaneously not explaining what it is that they want to get done that the Village is preventing them from acting on.

It’s sort of like a lot of the Republicans in Congress right now who say they want to address issues involving immigration and the border, but then don’t want to actually vote on bipartisan bills that would address those problems. 

Why? Because a broken border gives them something to campaign on in November.

Ditto here.

A “dysfunctional” town-village relationship gives local politicians something to run on, even if there are no real signs of dysfunction.

Unless you want to count that the Town Supervisor, as an employee of Rushmore Estates, has business before the Village Board, and that business has dragged on because, the village says, Rushmore Estates hasn’t worked on the things they’ve been asked to do.

In which event, the “dysfunction” isn’t really dysfunction at all, but a private business, where the Town Supervisor is employed, trying to get away with not following the same rules everyone else does; which, I don’t need to remind you, is a pretty big problem in our area.

I will say this for the Town Supervisor: I appreciate her clear passion concerning the Animal shelter. If there’s one thing I can point to and say this Town Board has on the agenda, it’s enhancing the shelter, and that’s something everyone should support.

That said, I spoke with the NYS Commission of Ethics concerning the Supervisor hiring her son to work as an animal control officer. Here’s what I learned:

The NYS Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government (COELIG) was created to oversee, regulate, and ensure compliance with New York State’s ethics and lobbying laws. COELIG has broad authority over Statewide elected officials, candidates for those offices, executive branch officers and employees, members of the Legislature and legislative branch employees and candidates, as well as certain political party chairs, and lobbyists and their clients at the state and local level. 

But … The Commission’s authority and jurisdiction do not extend to town officials.

What does that mean?

Residents may go to their Town or County Ethics Board, or their Town or County Attorney if they have ethics concerns.

There’s just one problem.

The Town of Woodbury Ethics committee, as far as I can tell, does not exist. (I reached out to the Town Clerk for more information and am waiting to hear back to confirm this. There is nothing on the Town’s website to indicate that such a committee exists.)

What Can You Do?

The simultaneous maneuvers by Supervisor Luciani to hire a family member, and then ask for a pay raise for herself — both occurred at the Town Board meeting on January 18th — while lacking a clearly defined agenda should give Woodbury residents paused.

In fact, I’ve been told a petition is now available that requests the proposed pay increase be put to a vote this November.

Interested residents can email JusticeForWoodbury@duck.com to sign the petition.

I don’t know what will happen this evening, but I hope that if the Town Supervisor plans to move forward with the proposed pay increase, that she and the board can clearly articulate to the town what their agenda is, and why the increase will help achieve those objectives.

That should be the minimum for anyone working in government that wants to have their pay raised.