August 5, 2024
The Community Digest is TIMBER’s newsletter on recent news impacting Troy and surrounding communities. A few quick notes:
On Thursday, August 8, community advocates and statewide partners will be joining us in urging the city to get its head in the game and finally pass a bond resolution so that we can begin the large-scale lead service line replacement project that’s been promised. Please join us at Troy City Hall starting at 6 pm.
If you’d like to attend but don’t know what to say, Jona Favreau has created a very helpful flyer laying out the problem we want the city to address.
If you can’t make it on August 8, our friends at Freshwater Future have drafted a wonderful and easy letter template that you can adapt to let city officials know how you feel.
TIMBER’s 2024 Summer Donor Drive is officially underway! This year, we’re closing it down as soon as we reach 20 first-time donors. As a grassroots organization, TIMBER’s work is only made possible with generous contributions from hundreds of members of the community. Please consider making a small donation today.
THE SIEGE OF TROY
The administration still has not shared an updated 2023 Annual Financial Report. The original 2023 AFR was wiped from Troy’s website in July, along with all quarterly reports since mid-2022.
To date, Troy has passed 20 ordinances amending the budget, the majority of which transfer $50,000 or less between expenditures. In total, we have seen less than $4 million in transfers between budgeted expenditures this year. At this point last year, that figure was well over $33 million.
Apart from accepting and appropriating grant money, the most substantial budget transfer in 2024 has been an April reappropriation of ARPA funds moving $500,000 out of demolitions and into an emergency relief fund. Although project names are blacked out in the misnumbered ordinance itself, the memorandum of support states that the funds will be used for safety issues like the Spring Avenue Landslide, the Ice Storm, and repairs to the Eddy Lane Pump Station.
Mayor Mantello issued an emergency declaration to address the Spring Avenue landslide on March 11. On March 29, the Troy Record reported that Spring Avenue had been reopened. From the article: “Mantello said they might as well landscape it and make it look nice… Now that we’re here, it gives us an opportunity to beautify a corridor that a lot of folks use.” The fortuitous landscaping opportunity included new concrete slabs and benches.
The pocket park’s signage welcoming visitors to the City of Troy is roughly one and a half miles from the nearest municipal boundary.
A FOIL request for public expenditures made under the Spring Avenue emergency declaration shows that a contractor invoiced the city $21,447.50 for 1 unit of Work Performed.
Additional invoices should be available to us in the coming weeks and we have sought clarification on the park’s SEQRA compliance.
By our count, the Mantello Administration has issued at least five emergency declarations in 2024. Those were for (1) Eddy Lane Pump Station repairs, (2) the 1124 5th Avenue demolition, (3) the city’s financial operations, (4) the March winter storm, and (5) the Spring Avenue landslide. We recently submitted FOIL requests for any receipts, invoices, work orders, or contracts relating to those emergency declarations as well as the declarations themselves. If you think we’ve missed any, please give us a holler.
As of July’s vacancy list, Troy has 42 open positions before counting unfilled appointments and the like.
Eight proposals were submitted in response to Troy’s RFP for a new city hall. First Columbia submitted two proposals while Wisdomworks, Siemens, Luizzi, the Italian Community Center, Columbia Development, and Clark Trading Corp. each submitted one. We are awaiting a response to a FOIL for the proposal evaluation criteria since none are stipulated in the RFP itself.
More from our Bureau of Nana Nana Boo Boo Affairs: Troy’s Corporation Counsel has now clarified that the Planning Board’s new training regimen will in fact be identical to what was expected of the Planning Commission, matching only the state’s minimum requirements. The administration frequently touted its plan to provide the Planning Board with extra training and resources throughout the public comment period, which technically has not ended because the administration jammed the legislation through too fast, but which also seemingly never happened.
The EPA’s John P. Buckley Water Filtration Plant facility report shows Troy at 2125% of the monthly average limit for effluent manganese. While manganese exceedances are not unusual for Troy, they are typically about a tenth of that. Please keep your eyes peeled for any unusual Soviet heavy industry on or near Oil Mill Creek.
By this day in 2023, the City Council had held four special meetings to address major or time-sensitive issues like the lead pipe crisis, large legal settlements, and Harbour Point. Since the start of this year, the City Council has called eleven special meetings. The three items on the July 2 special meeting agenda pertained to the ice skating rink, an animal shelter, and playground equipment.
A (BRIEF) AROUND THE HORN
The Albany Common Council unanimously passed legislation to lower speed limits in the city from 30 to 25 miles per hour. The law was signed by Mayor Sheehan and will go into effect on January 1, 2025.
A report on local bridge conditions from the Office of the State Comptroller found that 23.1% of locally owned bridges in Rensselaer County are in poor condition.
To date, at least Syracuse and Rochester have passed bond ordinances tied to Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding for both public and private lead service line replacement. This marks an enormous milestone that Troy has not yet reached due to confusion or other maladies.
The 112th Street bridge between Cohoes and Troy. 1930.
CAPTAIN’S LOG
In 1806, shoemakers in Philadelphia went on strike and were promptly convicted of criminal conspiracy to disrupt the free market. It was the first decision of its kind, and it bankrupted the union involved. For labor organizers, the next few decades honestly did not go much better.
Long before getting judicially suplexed for unionizing, free workers were organized into guilds. For specialized crafts, guilds were very effective at standardizing prices, establishing and enforcing quality standards, and managing the labor supply. By the 1790s, American industry had matured to a point at which guild labor was still lucrative for masters but far more dangerous, demanding, and unstable for journeymen, and many workers decided to create organizations that would protect their interests the same way that guilds protected their industries. It was such a great idea that the state punished them for dreaming of it. After the Philadelphia shoemaker case, courts routinely called nascent unions in to answer for their crimes against profit-seeking and punished them in sometimes draconian ways when they were inevitably found guilty.
Then, in 1842, Massachusetts shocked the nation by ruling that collective labor activity was legal so long as it was not illegal. This may sound a bit like putting a hat on a hat, but this was a novel legal interpretation that broke from decades of prior rulings in materially similar cases. For the early labor movement, this was both lucky and not: by repeatedly testing their narrow odds, trade unionists became an intractable force that eventually parlayed an unblemished loss record into a stalemate with capital. They won that stalemate because they had to. Given unlimited chances, even very low-probability events will eventually happen.
To conceptualize success like this — in decades — we have to forfeit our pride and behave in ways that peers can reasonably characterize as irrational. Organizing workers believed their lives could get better, obviously, but they also understood that they could (and probably would) get worse if they did something about it. Nameless people with rich and exciting personal lives went to prison for trade unionism, and some would not live to see it pay off. Zooming out, relative to any other outcome, this is not so tragic. Take a moment to think about bridges that you frequently drive over and whether you’d be more likely to notice if one collapsed than if its placard got swapped, and you might conclude that people mostly care about what’s in the world and very little about who we say put it there. Credit just doesn’t last very long, even if you debase yourself obsessively collecting it. Some people waste their entire lives and everyone else’s time trying to be thought about and remembered, and this can move folks to pity or appeasement but rarely respect.
Reading the news, you might be questioning whether civic engagement is worth the effort. If all that’s keeping you from getting in the scrum is some concern that you might fail, or that public officials will disappoint, berate, or ignore you, the bad news is that will likely happen even under normal circumstances. The good news is that, as long as we collectively stay upright, the ideals we pour our hearts into prevail anyway. If your bell is getting rung then someone’s arm is getting tired, and that’s one of the best ways to create new openings.
— Greg
