As if village Mayor Terry Dungan suffering a stroke on Christmas Day wasn't bad enough: The longtime chief of the New Paltz volunteer fire department, David Weeks, has just resigned in the wake of a leaked email conversation between village elected officials.
The New Paltz Times appears to have an exclusive on this story, and quotes extensively from the emails. In them, Dungan and village trustees Robert Feldman and Shari Osborn argue over the proper response to mounting burdens and plummeting morale at the fire department.
Weeks didn't offer the Times any comment on his resignation, but Feldman said he thought the emails were just the last of a long line of indignities for the chief:
“We all have a breaking point, and I think things said in those e-mails by certain board members just was the straw that broke the chief’s back,” Trustee Robert Feldman said. “It is so unfortunate, because he not only has provided this community with 25 years of his time, expertise and volunteerism, never touching a dime, and waking up at all hours of the night to answer to emergency calls, but they also lost a great leader and a man with so much experience. It deeply saddened me. There are not enough great things to say about Dave. He’s invaluable.”
"Certain board members" surely refers to Osborn -- who, the paper notes, once said of Weeks, at a public meeting no less, "I f---ing hate him," and who spent much of the email exchange arguing against new expenditures for the fire department:
The mayor said that he had advocated for sleeping arrangements and also for a new fire house that “should have been built 12 years ago,” and that’s why he advocated for the NPFD to go to a “fire district,” which never made it onto the ballot because the Town Board voted 4-1 against a public referendum.
In the e-mails, Trustee Osborn went on to say that she didn’t like what she felt was the “immediacy” in all of this and that had the bunk beds been presented at budget time and “clearly explained,” we would have “of course granted them the funds needed to create bunks at the fire station.”
Had that been the case, she said, “then other items they requested would have had to wait (like maybe the new truck would have had to have been purchased a year later instead of earlier, or some of that seldom-used rescue equipment they asked for, that they explained could be needed in a special situation, would have had to wait too). A larger Fire Department budget was impossible this year -- you know that as well as I do, Terry. All departments have bare-bones budgets and the Fire Department budget needed to be too if we were to remain fair and equitable across the board. This is what our constituents expect of us and this is how I, personally, must serve them during budget time.”
Here's hoping 2011 gets better for New Paltz. The bloggers over at New Paltz Gadfly are hoping so, too -- they've posted a long and optimistic Wish List for 2011, featuring such pie-in-the-sky items as sanely-drawn electoral districts, "civil and feisty" races for local government seats, and "a mayoral campaign that results in a win by someone who actually knows New Paltz."
