Feeling Betrayed

There's has been no shortage of emails and comments on yesterday's report that the town GOP has offered Democrat Al Spain its endorsement for Supervisor. We know one fellow who finally understands what it means to be betrayed by people he thought he could trust.

Not that this understanding and all of the conflict it causes one internally will do anything to change the behavior of the Supervisor. His 3 plus years in office offer a collage of personal betrayals of people who trusted him that are far to extensive to re-chronicle here. Suffice to say that this is the first time he as been injured to the same degree which he has so frequently and unremorsefully injured others.

So Mr. Evers feels his 2007 running mate stabbed him in the back by interviewing with the GOP for the party's Supervisor nomination and never telling him. We understand that the GOP committee didn't mention Spain's request either. Well, they really can't be faulted for not sharing that knowledge. But Evers forgets what he did to his allies on the Town Board and the people who worked so hard to elect him in his 2005 campaign. He chooses not to consider his own actions which must have led Spain to move against him. How many enemies can you make before you make too many to stay afloat in a self created political swamp?

What it all boils down to is the reality that what goes around comes around. Those you crap on as you climb the ladder are ofter folks you have to pass on your way down. When you conduct yourself professionally and personally in a manner in which deception and misrepresentation are embedded in every action and in every sentence, you are bound to find that it will eventually catch up to you.

An American scholar and author Thomas Sowell put it this way, "One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them".

Project Subject of Public Hearing and Special Board Meeting

It didn't take long for the Supervisor to schedule a Special Board Meeting to try and get passed a zoning change for a developer who is seeking IDA tax breaks for a senior housing project. The Public Hearing is tomorrow, the notice for which you may read here. Before the ink is dried, the Supervisor has called a Special Board Meeting to vote on the project which would see the taxpayers loose substantial tax revenues due to the developer, (Nigro) planning to apply for an IDA Pilot agreement from the Rensselaer County IDA. North Greenbush would loose tax revenues on an apartment complex while providing all the essential services, police, fire, ambulance, highway, schools, etc.

Obviously this is not the kind of project that should be granted IDA tax breaks. Such breaks should go to projects that produce long term permanent jobs. This one won't do that anymore than the last IDA giveaway, the Oak Hill Apartments did. Further, North Greenbush has its own IDA and Mark Evers chairs it. If the town thinks the tax breaks are justified, then let the town reap the fees and benefits for it's own IDA which apparently, wisely, despite Mr. Evers, would not approve such a deal.

An afterthought comes to mind on the speedy call for the Special Meeting to help this developer. When Mark Evers had a legal obligation to call a special meeting of the town board after he and Ernie Kern broke their pledge to support the Comprehensive Plan, Evers ignored the law and let the clock run out on the terms of the council members calling the meeting. Too bad they were town board members instead of developers.