Cornwall NY Republican Town Committee

A MESSAGE FROM THE CORNWALL REPUBLICAN COMMITTEE

Cornwall Deserves Better.

An open letter to our neighbors.

Dear Neighbor,

Before anything else, thank you. Thank you for caring about this town, for showing up to meetings on weeknights you would rather spend at home, for reading your tax bill instead of just paying it, for asking hard questions when easy ones would have been more comfortable. Cornwall is what it is because of people like you, and it has been for a long time. So when something is wrong here, you are the ones who deserve to hear about it first, and to hear it straight.

This week, the Town Supervisor wrote a message to all of us in this newspaper. He told you the public hearing on the Comprehensive Plan would be “deliberate.” He told you it would be “how open government should work.” He told you your voice would be “carefully considered.” We wish those words were true. We have watched, week after week and meeting after meeting, and they are not.

Open government, in this town, has stopped being a practice and become a performance. You can see it in the small things, which is usually where you can see anything that matters. It begins at the inbox. When a resident writes the Supervisor with a real question, about the budget, about a vote, about why a decision was made the way it was made, most of the time nothing comes back at all. When a reply does arrive, it arrives long after the moment has passed and the question no longer matters. Silence is its own kind of answer, and that is the answer this office has chosen to give.

It continues at the filing cabinet. New York’s Freedom of Information Law could not be plainer. When records exist in digital form, the Town has to provide them in digital form. The Supervisor’s office has refused. Residents asking for emails and electronic files have been handed stacks of paper printouts, or nothing at all. That is not a paperwork dispute and it is not a technicality. That is the Town, today, refusing what the law requires of it, with your records in the balance.

And it shows up most clearly at the place where it should fail least, the public meeting. When a resident stands at the microphone and raises a real concern, about a friend of the administration being appointed, about a stipend that was paid, about a budget line that does not add up, and the Supervisor does not like what he hears, the answer from the dais is two words. “Thank you.” No engagement. No follow up. No answer on the record. The microphone goes back in the stand and the meeting moves on. And if a resident keeps pressing, if they refuse to take the brush off and ask again, the polite dismissal turns into something colder. Their motives get questioned. They are told they “only care because it’s an election year.” But caring is not a flaw. It is the whole point of being a neighbor in a town like this one.

That is not how open government works. That is how a closed door is dressed up to look like one. Open government is not a column you publish in the newspaper the week before a hearing. It is the habit of an elected official on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, when an email from a resident lands in the inbox, when a records request arrives on the desk, when a neighbor stands up with a question that has a real answer behind it. One staged afternoon does not make a town open. What happens the other three hundred and sixty four days a year is what counts, and on those days, this office has gone quiet on the people it works for.

There is one more thing worth putting on the record while we are speaking plainly. Some in town have suggested that the website TruthCornwall.com is the work of this committee. It is not. We did not build it, do not run it, and do not control what it publishes, and our neighbors deserve to hear that from us directly. What the site does have, and what is worth a moment of any resident’s time, is something this Town Hall has not been quick to share itself. Budgets, meeting minutes, FOIL responses, campaign filings, all gathered in one place. Read them. Draw your own conclusions. An honest town would want nothing less of its residents.

And to our neighbors, the people who have been writing the unanswered emails and standing at the unfriendly microphones, we want to say something simply. You are not imagining any of this. The emails really do go unanswered. The records really are being withheld. The concerns you have raised really are being met with a two word brush off and a sideways look. You have been right to notice, right to be frustrated, and right to keep asking, and you should not stop on either of our accounts.

Because Cornwall has never been the man at the front of the room. Cornwall is the people who coach the kids, who run the firehouse, who sit through the three hour meetings even when they would rather be anywhere else, who shovel a neighbor’s walk when the snow comes down. That is the town. That is what is worth defending. And that town deserves more than empty words and easy promises in a newspaper column. It deserves action. It deserves a Town Hall that picks up the phone, returns the email, hands over the record, and answers the question the first time it is asked, not the fifth. Most of all, it deserves leadership that listens to every concern raised by every resident, and not only the ones that flatter the person at the front of the room. That is the standard. We will not settle for less than it, and neither should you.