To tell you the truth, I have been toying with this question for some time. I have spent some time and bent some ears asking this question and I still don't have a clear answer. This question is perhaps more complex than I thought which has lead me to a few underlying questions. The answer revolves around anonymity, openness and the trouble with confidentiality. Let me try to explain my thinking.

For most bloggers or participates in a site like TheBatavian, anonymity isn’t an issue. Even if you were to use your real name, you’re still basically anonymous. Ask yourself how many people know you and if they do know you are those people unaware of your political leanings, or outlook on life? Political figures have no such anonymity. On top of this there is also a general feeling of negativity towards anyone holding public office. I personally have been attacked several times on this site by people who disagree with my viewpoints and at times told that I shouldn't have the right to post at all. I find those to be among the most UN-American suggestions I have ever heard. I would think that people would want to hear what their elected officials think, whether they disagreed or not. Some might say it is a duty of every elected official to respond to any question asked.

Another part of this question is openness and why elected people would fear it in the first place. The fear for an elected person is that every time you offer an opinion someone will most certainly disagree with it and you will have one less vote come election time. Maybe they are right, if politics is a game being used to "play up to the crowd" or manipulate people. I think for the most part, a game is what politics has become in this country. Lies and deceit, playing up to the crowd and goading the other guy are now common place in politics. Our state is not in trouble because of Republicans or Democrats; it has more to do with the system that is now in place. This hurts us when tough decisions need to be made. Instead of working as a team, the party that is not in power plays politics to the detriment of the entire state. Personal gain and power is the driving factor in all of it. The attitude is, if your party is not in power, than to hell with the state or the country. That's the political mantra of our country. 

I wonder what politics would be like in our country without political parties? Without anyone to do you’re thinking for you, would people have to dig deeper into issues and have a better understanding before they took a side? Without political parties would politicians have to get their own message out without having a mob of blind followers to spin it for them?  Could future politicians survive without the shield a political party offers? If this took place, wouldn’t all politicians have to turn to the web and blogs? Isn't that the type of system we should be striving for to run our country? Isn't that "The more perfect union" we have been looking for? The answer is, we are not there yet but, we can not achieve the goal without people taking the first steps to "real" open government.

I would like to respond to the story “Mallow criticizes leak of info from executive session” in the September 25^th addition of the Daily News.

I am embarrassed and ashamed that a Council person would use a confidential letter sent by a city resident in an improper way. Our citizens should feel confident that problems they have with city staff will be handled in a professional manner and not for political purposes. The city takes all accusations seriously and attempts to work through these problems in a confidential way. We must be respectful and discreet to those who file a complaint, as well as the person it was filed against. Releasing personnel information and matters related to potential litigation that have been discussed in an executive session is an unethical abuse of power. Our city residents are financially liable for any indiscretion of this type.

I know for certain that this citizen assumed that the letter would be held in strict confidence and would like to thank the Daily News for not releasing the name of the complainant. It is also clear that a member of Council abused their elected position and divulged privileged information on two separate occasions in the last month. I want you to know that we will do everything in our power to determine who abused their position.

 I fully understand the feelings of the EMTs and no one on Council was happy to have to come to a decision to end county wide ambulance service as of September 1st. There is no question that our city medics have provided and continue to provide a high quality service for all county residents. Although, recently the union has brought forth information from a questionable paid source that they describe as "fact". I want the public to understand that the use of fabricated information, fear tactics and targeting of Council is not going to shake our resolve. Council has taken every imaginable step we could find to make the city based service viable. This financial decision was made based on years of public discussions as well as input, with all the information we required being presented. 

The county has made it clear that they have a process in place to see that the entire county will have ambulance service by September 1st. There is no reason to believe the hysteria being asserted by the union that there will be no one to provide ambulance service after September 1st. Moreover, there have been at least five ambulance providers that have contacted the County or the City that are interested to providing ambulance service to this region.  Should one of these providers be selected they would be responding to ambulance calls from within the City just as they currently do now. 

As directed by Council, I have sent a letter to all county municipalities terminating all our inter-municipal ambulance agreements as of September 1^st. These are the agreements that allowed the city to provide ambulance service county-wide. During the last public meeting of the GAM, Council as a whole publicly informed all the members that the city is not getting back into the business of providing ambulance service. Council has made it clear that we will not under any circumstances "go at it alone" by entering into an agreement with a private provider. The city is just one of many municipalities that is looking to the county to provide a county wide ambulance service and that decision about a provider is one for the county as a whole to make.

We in the city have several issues to deal with; our problems are not unusual for a small city in upstate NY. We suffer from a decaying infrastructure and a shrinking population that puts stress on our ability to provide cost effective services to our residents.

The cities sidewalks, roads, water and sewer infrastructures have seen better days. A lot of our infrastructure is depression era work that was done in the 1920’s. Our recent financial problems have left us with very little money for these necessary repairs. Currently our water system has several points that are leaking water into the ground. Water that doesn’t make it to your tap is wasted and still must be paid for through an increase in the cost of water rates. There is also another problem with our aging water system; the old pipes we have are smaller 4’ pipes that do not have enough capacity for fire protection. 

Financially it has been a long hard road back to stability for our city. The numbers show that our tough choices in recent years have secured our footing on solid ground. The success of Batavia Downs has been a big help for our city. For the last several years the state government has given communities that host tracks money. This money is not something we believed would continue so, up to this point the city has only used this money for debt reduction. In the last two years close to a million dollars of this VLT money has helped pay down our debt. This year’s numbers will show our city back in the black and financially solvent. Our new budget is also more business like and was created with long term planning in mind. The use of contingency funds to put money aside for replacing equipment and future repairs will help us in the long run and keep your tax rate level. 

As you probably have heard by now, the federal government has passed a bill they believe will create jobs and help get our economy moving again. Our city staff and Council have been watching the events leading up to this bill very closely and taking proactive steps to assure that our community is not left behind. Myself as well as Marianne Clattenburg have just returned from a series of meetings in Albany . These meetings were designed to inform mayors from around the state about the grant money for infrastructure repairs available as part of this stimulus aid. We were able to secure several private meetings, chief among them were with representatives of the governors office.

The information we obtained has given us a clear understanding of what the city needs to do to compete for this very large pool of money. The federal government is interested in giving our economy an immediate boost and is looking for projects that are call “shovel ready”. A shovel ready project is one that is already planned, has a design, and is ready to start. It has been made very clear to us that any project that is to be considered must be able to have the first shovel in the ground within 180 days. This month council acted to invest this year’s state VLT aid money to create the designs necessary to make sure that our city and county benefit from the federal stimulus bill. We will actively pursue any avenue necessary to ensure our city speaks with a voice loud enough to be heard. This bill and securing our share of the stimulus aid is a prime concern of the City Council.

I just returned tonight from Albany. I think we had a very successful effort. I will be sharing that information with you in another post within the next couple of days.

For now, I need to share with you the pride I have for our City Manager Jason Molino and his Assistant Sally Kuzon. Over the last couple of days, working on a tight schedule and during very stressful time, they both represented the city with distinction. The preparation they showed and their knowledge of the subject matter they displayed was exceptional. They both cast a very large shadow and I am grateful for all their hard work.

Thank You Both!!!

There has been a rash of out of town people telling Batavia City Council how to spend city resident’s money as of late. I always sit back in amazement when people who don’t live in the city or pay our taxes call for raising the burdens on city residents. City Council represents the interests of city residents, period. It is not in the interest of city residents to provide “extra” services or expend dollars we don’t have to support wasteful spending being demanded by residents who don’t live in the city.

There is a lot of frustration that I see with the way this financial crisis is being handled in Washington.

Our government is taking steps to turn our country to socialism. I had thought that both Democrats and Republicans had agreed that we wanted to live in a capitalist country. What I see is a sellout from both sides of our system, for votes. These people want to make it look like they are doing something to solve the financial crisis so bad, that they are willing to do the worst things possible.

In what was our economic system, when you made a mistake, you were allowed to fail. That was the risk of success. That fear kept the system in check. There is now no downside to greed. LET THEM FAIL! It’s the American way or it was…

Like it or not, no one paid much attention to George Washington when it came to his stand on political parties. It is one of those things that 200 plus years of hindsight helped us to understand but, it’s too late now to change. Our two party democracy is the system we have and will have because there is no going back. The only way to change it would be some type of violent revolution or a spontaneous act that goes against human nature. Forget it, humans are tribal, it’s always been US vs. THEM. As was previously alluded to in the opening post, our system has a strong dependency on the balance of power among our two parties.  Our system will surely would fall apart if either party was to overwhelm the other and force it out of existence.  The checks and balances that our system depends on would be gone.

Your County Democratic Committee meets and organizes for one reason only, to make sure that we can field a candidate to carry our line that represents your beliefs. It’s safe to say that as a whole Genesee County Democrats are a little more conservative in our beliefs than most state wide Democrats. We also don’t treat our county Republicans as the enemy or feel that we need to eliminate them from office at all costs either.  

There have been a few postings about the state of our neighborhoods and people’s opinions of the rate of decline. From someone new to the area or familiar with big city living, some missing paint and a little litter are not anything to be concerned about. People in big cities have had to live with falling property values, absentee landlords and drug activity for years. The obvious question is, why wouldn’t the people of Batavia point to the precursors of decline and pull together to keep the quality of life we have always enjoyed?

I'd like to extend my thanks to everyone that participated in this week’s clean up on Thorpe, Watson and Maple streets, it was a good step in the right diretion. We were able to make a nice improvement on those streets, giving just a few hours of our time. Deb Pappalardo wrote the following to ask the public for their help with next weeks effort. This is a very important initiative for our cities neighborhoods and I would hope all willing and able will turn out to give a little time to make Batavia a little greener and cleaner. As you may or may not know, New Hope Church was involved and provided volunteers as well. It was a terrific turn out, more than we could have hoped for. Seeing the residents of that neighborhood coming out with their children to help was reassuring. It appeared as though our efforts were appreciated and may inspire them to continue to make their neighborhood more aesthetically pleasing. This will be an ongoing effort throughout the coming months, and maybe even years to come. New Hope Church will be working with us or we with them, however you want to look at it. Since it will be executed on a strictly volunteer basis we are counting on the residents of Batavia for help. Everyone has something to offer. For those who want to be a part of this effort but really don't have a lot of time to spare, they can donate money, product or both. We have someone donating yard signs. A kind of "Helping Hands Was Here" sort of sign to be moved from place to place. We have people donating the use of trailers to haul garbage and debris away. There are those who are paying the fees to where the garbage and debris are going. Some are donating tools to rake yards and sweep streets, gloves and garbage bags to pick up and bag garbage and yard waste. For a time, Julie and I are going to bring our rolling kitchen out to prepare donated food for the volunteers. What we need the most are able bodies. We had such a great turnout on our first run but we don't want to see people burn out. And, those who donated trailers won't be able to offer them up every Saturday. If there are others who have trailers and willing to donate we certainly could use them. I have a hitch on my truck. Next week we will be working Jackson, Highland and Liberty Streets. We need volunteers. We need equipment. Rakes, brooms, yard waste and garbage bags, gloves, mowers, weed eaters, hauling trailers, anything that can be deemed yard care equipment. We need food. Hotdogs, hamburgers, buns, chips, condiments, bottled water, propane. Anything anyone wants to donate. It's a community effort and no one's donation is too great or too small. Deb Pappalardo If anyone wants to know what he or she can do to be a part of this effort please call New Hope Church at 585-343-2997 or email Barb Toal at BTCSdepot@aol.com.