Photo by Pete DeMola
Halfway through his first term, Mayor Colin Read reflects on the road behind and the battles ahead.
PLATTSBURGH | Mayor Colin Read is halfway through his first term.
Since he took office two years ago, Read has taken aim at some of the city’s longest-standing issues, whether it be systemic “fictional budgeting” — his term for the sort of imbalanced approach to financial planning he believes the city has partaken in over the years — or defunct contracts with Plattsburgh’s labor unions.
The mayor also had a hand in the passing of 15 local laws, many of them alterations of the city code, and the shuttering of five departments in all.
These changes haven’t been without controversy, and the remaining two years of his first term could prove much the same.
More positions are expected to be left unfilled as city workers retire.
And despite the difficult cuts made in the last two years, Read says that more must come.
The Common Council passed a budget for 2019 this month, and the slated $500,000 surplus is half of what Read had said he hoped for when announcing his budget last year.
“We can’t just fix six years of smoke and mirrors with one year of hard work,” Read told The Sun. “We’re probably going to be working at this for three or four years.”
That means more “sacrifices, lots of complaining and people upset,” he said.
The result, he hopes, will be a general fund balance close to the $6.8 million the city had several years ago, and a city budget that’s sustainable.
“We’re on the verge of becoming unaffordable,” he said.
In the future, the city’s tax rate can’t rise faster than Social Security, Read said.
If it does, he fears that senior citizens will move away and that population won’t be replaced by millennials, who are increasingly happier in cities larger than Plattsburgh, according to a report published in Regional Studies.
Read said that he hopes that in the next two years representatives from the Town of Plattsburgh, Clinton County and the Plattsburgh City School District will all get together in a room and hash out everything from the Falcon Seaboard dispute to the Rugar Street annexation and the Webb Island Footbridge.
“The city is absolutely essential. But we need everybody to get into a room and agree that the city is essential,” he said.
“Let’s recognize that our little boat here is leaking, but we’re all sitting in the boat together and we need to figure out what to do with the leaks.”
