Those Other Sidney Warriors

Happy New Year!

Now that 2011 is well underway, it’s time to introduce the main topic of conversation for the year: local elections.

This year, there will be four major town offices up for grabs in November. There will be two seats on the Town Board (currently occupied by John Schaeffer and Paul Hamilton), plus Town Clerk (currently, Lisa French) and Superintendent of Highways (currently, Jamie Roberts).

I’ll just mention here that nobody intends to oppose Jaime Roberts. Everybody loves him and he does a very good job.

If we can find a candidate for Town Clerk, that would be spiffy (and, just so you know, Town Clerk is a full time job with a full time salary). But the most important thing for us to do is to run a couple of strong candidates for the Town Board.

It’s important because, until 2013, the only way we have available to de-fang Bob McCarthy is to take away his majority on the Board. We won’t be able to stop him from continuing to be an embarrassment at the county level but we can at least stop him from destroying the town.

So, in the interests of the preservation of the Town of Sidney from further stupidity, malfeasance, and general foot-in-mouth disease, let me know if there are any Democrats here in town who you think would make really good candidates for local office. That includes you, by the way; if you’re thinking about running for office, by all means, please get in touch.

Let’s stop letting Sidney Republicans win by default, m-kay?

While there has been a certain amount of relatively high profile attention paid to PR blunders like the Sufi private cemetery fiasco and Supervisor McCarthy’s role in the attempt to get rid of Lisa Barrows, there are more serious instances of the town government’s negligence that are worth talking about.

Here’s one: did you know that a sizable chunk of the population of the Town of Sidney does not have access to clean drinking water?

Yes, that’s right. No clean drinking water and we’re not talking about some obscure village on the banks of the Indus River or something. This is right here in upstate New York.

And the Town of Sidney’s government isn’t doing anything about it.

Now, in justice to the current Town Board, this problem has been there for a long time, long before Mr. McCarthy got elected to office.

However, a majority of the current board (excepting Pete Cordes and Paul Hamilton) has made it extremely clear that they do not intend to vote to provide a single penny to take care of anything in Sidney Center, in spite of the fact that Sidney Center residents actually pay slightly more in taxes than the rest of the Town … or so I am told.

Possibly you may wonder how the town government manages to get away with this. After all, Sidney Center’s water is testing positive for e. coli and this is their responsibility. Public utilities and all that, right?

Well, evidently, for as long as nobody is jumping up and down and yelling about it, nobody had to care.

Personally, I think it’s high time somebody jumped up and down and yelled about it.

I am new enough to Sidney that I fail completely to understand the hostility between the village of Sidney and the hamlet of Sidney Center, except that I hear the source of the controversy is over 100 years in the past and involved railroads.

My gut reaction: get over it already!

In the end, I have a feeling this is one of those things that will yield to either public pressure or legal action. I rather think the next major move ought to come from the Attorney General’s office.

We’ll see.