Just in time for the Easter holidays, the Village of Saugerties has been crucified by the state comptroller with one of the worst fiscal ratings in Christendom.

The comptroller’s office measures municipalities it audits on a scale from zero (for zowie!) for the best to 100 for the worst. Saugerties village finances were given an 85, which under the comptroller’s rules means “severely stressed.” Other towns in the county were in the 16 to 20 range, more or less the norm.

For Saugerties, it was just one more slap in the face, as former county legislator Jeanette Provenzano, D-Kingston, used to say. First it was that craziness with the town police department last summer, then more recently a stretch of road in Glasco that had collapsed to the tune of “millions of dollars,” according to the town highway superintendent.

That was the town. Village Mayor Bill Murphy could not allow this slur on his town board to go undefended.

An obviously angry mayor hung his hat on two points of criticism by the comptroller: that the village had borrowed $300,000 for equipment last year and that it had not filed a financial report in 2022.

Murphy refuted both charges. The village paid off the loan within months, he said, and it had a copy of the financial report it supposedly didn’t send to the comptroller.

Murphy’s assertion that the village hadn’t raised property taxes in 10 consecutive years was more a revelation than an excuse and beside the point, to boot. That is a political decision meant to re-elect incumbents.

Rejoice not, village people at the seeming largess by your village board. If a series of village boards froze the tax rate at an artificial (read: political) level for a decade, they, like the comptroller, should also be questioning village financial management.

Let’s take the longer view, which is to say some 50 miles south and west from Saugerties to the Village of Ellenville, hard on the county line with Sullivan. The government there also held the line on property taxes for years and now they’re either bankrupt or very close to the brink.

Will Comptroller DiNapoli order a battalion of bean counters to troubled Ellenville?

I think not because Ellenville has a friend at court and I’m not talking about the bailiff.

Hometown boy Elliott Auerbach was a former village mayor and manager before being elected to the first of three terms as county comptroller in 2008. DiNapoli brought him to Albany halfway through his last term as his deputy for local affairs. Auerbach retired at the end of 2022 after a few years, but returned to public service, seemingly as an emergency measure, as Ellenville’s village manager earlier this year.

If DiNapoli has his eye on Ellenville, and he should, I doubt if that shoe will drop much sooner than after the fall elections.

Baden, Biden: What’s In a Name?

When I read the Freeman headline “Baden will step down” in Sunday’s paper, I almost coughed up an Easter egg.

“Joe Biden quit?” I yelled to my wife in the kitchen. “No, you fool,” she called back. “That was Mike Baden, the town supervisor in Rochester.”

Oh.

That Baden decided to quit next month only a few months into his third term came as a surprise. His stated reasons did not.

“The local level of government is very toxic these days,” he told Freeman correspondent Bill Kemble.

Baden didn’t offer specific instances to the reporter, but did speak to “lies, accusations and outright hate” directed at him as town supervisor. Lest one considers the burly Baden something of a thin-skinned crybaby, he’s not entirely wrong. Our politics are toxic these days, and they are not about to get better soon.

Baden, a former school board member, rode a rising Democratic tide in once rock-solid Republican Rochester to election as supervisor in 2017. He weathered the pandemic, as we all did, and seemed to be on a short list for higher office.

I know him as an intelligent, fair-minded kind of guy. A true volunteer, he’d throw his weight behind any good cause. Just this January, he stepped forward to replace Ulster supervisor Jim Quigley as head of the county Association of Towns, Villages and Cities.

For a town supervisor, Baden took a particular interest in county government. There may have been a few others, but Baden was the only town supervisor who regularly attended county legislature meetings.

That an accomplished public official could be driven from office by “toxic” politics does not bode well for the body politic.

Media Notes

Effective as she might be as a two-term state senator, Michelle Hinchey, in my humble opinion, is given far too much “free press” these days than her record might merit.

Nothing against the daughter of master press manipulator the late Maurice Hinchey, but the senator has only to wave and the Freeman falls at her feet. Whatever she can conjure, be it a photo, press release or rally, the once-proud daily gobbles up and reprints it verbatim.

From the senator’s side, she might retort, “What am I supposed to do, hide my light under a bushel?”

Or course not. But does anyone on the paper’s depleted staff ever ask, “Whatever happened to editorial discretion?”

What the Freeman doesn’t get is that the senator has been gaming them for quite some time.

Last week, she set a modern record by appearing in three separate photos on the front page. Two were almost identical group photos of local politicians warning about proposed “cuts” to local programs in the governor’s budget. The governor is proposing a more than $4 billion increase in education; protestors are talking about a fraction of that. The third was a headshot of Hinchey flip-flopping on Good Cause Eviction.

Hinchey apparently does not answer negative inquiries from media. According to the March 23 story by the usually reliable Paul Kirby, “Hinchey did not respond to several requests [from the Freeman] on Friday.” Several in media speak refers to more than two, possibly three attempts to reach a subject.

That the senator did not respond to a legitimate question to a newspaper she has been spoon-feeding for more than three years speaks volumes. This is a one-way relationship that does not serve readers.