After a contentious discussion over a $75,000 increase in what the Town of Cobleskill wants to charge the Village for snow removal and other services Tuesday, the two men likely to have the best solution were left to sort it out.
Town Highway Superintendent Tom Gallagher and Village Department of Public Works Superintendent Aaron Cooper will sit down and draft their version of a deal before the Joint Highway Committee meets Wednesday.
“I’ve literally been asking for that for two years,” Mayor Becky Stanton-Terk, who called the meeting after blasting the town over what’s in the past been called a shared services agreement at her August Village Board meeting.
At issue, she said Tuesday, is a draft MOU that substantially cuts town services to the village while increasing the village’s cost by $74,000.
“Partially, I want justification for this,” Mayor Stanton-Terk said.
The justification, Deputy Supervisor RJ Mallery said, is that the scope of the Highway Department’s work has gone up as the number of employees has, over time, dropped from 12 to four—in part because everyone’s having trouble finding qualified staff.
The town DPW is now snow-blowing village sidewalks, Mr. Mallery said, something that wasn’t in the original 2007 shared services agreement.
“And the costs of everything are going up,” he said. “I’m pretty sure than $74,000 is for increases in sand, salt, street sweeping, employees…”
Mayor Stanton-Terk said she’d been told by Cobleskill Supervisor Werner Hampel ‘If we don’t have the people, your streets won’t be plowed’; Mr. Hampel said “without bodies,” by necessity, their priority will be “hospital hill.
“We have a responsibility to the town,” he said. “Most of the village streets are plowed by the county.”
They’ve been trying to hire, Mr. Hampel said, “But if we don’t have the bodies, what the hell are we going to do?”
Mr. Cooper said the town and village have always worked together and that he and Mr. Gallagher talk regularly.
But to ask the village to also take on summer tasks like street sweeping, line painting, and pothole patching as outlined in the MOU would require them to redo their entire budget.
The MOU is negotiable, Mr. Hampel said.
It was Mr. Cooper who suggested he and Mr. Gallagher sit down and try to work out an agreement.
“We’re still the ones doing the work,” he pointed out. “And this [the draft MOU], it’s obviously not going to work.
“I agree,” Mr. Mallery said. “It starts there.”
The two will sit down and bring something back to Wednesday’s Highway Committee meeting.