Jellie takes message of too many community ills to town board
By Dan McClelland
Downtown Businessman Steve Jellie took his message of too many ills hurting the community to the Town of Tupper Lake Board at its regular monthly meeting on May 12.
Last month the co-owner of Larkins’ Junction Deli brought his list of community concerns for the village board members to hear at their monthly meeting.
He began at the town board’s May meeting by telling the elected town leaders there “there is a lack of collaboration” between the members of the three local government boards in the addressing of this community’s “most pressing matters.”
“The No. 1 issue for me, and you might find this odd, is the Tupper Lake school system. I list this as No. 1 because without a school, how long do we have a town? Tupper Lake will become just another summer playground for the wealthy!
“I know the initial reaction from most of you is that ‘we don’t control the school board!’ But as I asked a moment ago: Without a school, do we have a town?
“It’s worth stating out loud, your main source of revenue is the same as the school’s main source of revenue: property taxes from business owners and property owners of the town.”
He noted the school, unlike the county, doesn’t receive a share of the sales taxes generated here.
“Coordination, communication and absolute collaboration are essential!
“I just don’t mean you reading the minutes of each other’s meetings. When was the last time a member of this board attended a school board meeting? When was the last time a member of the school board attended one of your meetings, and asked for more coordination, more collaboration, asked how can we work on this together?
“Now, on abandoned properties. Please note I referred to them earlier as ‘blighted property.’ Because at this point, if we are only dealing with blighted property, we would be in good shape and we are not in good shape!”
He said the Main Street business district has “two fire piles lying idle with no definitive time in sight for the removal of either one!”
“Within a decent golf shot of my store there are three other properties that are abandoned. On one of them the property taxes haven’t been paid in close to 20 years. Yet we are still phantomly collecting property taxes on!
“Another is owned by people with plenty of means to fix it, yet it sits with broken windows and appliances on the front porch.
“What is the plan for cleaning these messes up? Are we really sitting here on this board waiting for the village to do it?
“We all knew it was just a matter of time before 41 Main Street completed its destiny,” he said referring the most recent fire scene at Pine and Main. “-And yet three levels of local leadership cannot figure out how to remove that fire pile after over 100 days. If those two messes were across from or adjacent to your business or your home, would you all be infinitely patient with the process?
“Would you tolerate the threat to your business or your home, and expect those unsightly images to the area where you expect customers and visitors from out of the area to know the story?
“I ask that we please chart a plan for strategic and aggressive code enforcement of the entire town, which we don’t have now nor have had for many years!
“Public safety! There’s a nonsensical notion I’ve heard that the Town of Tupper Lake does need a local police force. I can’t quote the analysis that the town completed to support this notion, but I do know the village police chief has made several pleas for the resources to protect the entire Town of Tupper Lake.
“If you have not been the direct victim of a crime in the past five years, you know someone who has!
“The state police are not chartered, funded or staffed to take care of law enforcement for our entire town. -And while they do a magnificent job of what they do, it is time this board recognizes public safety is a top priority (for the town) and not the village’s priority. It is time for the town to accepts management responsibility for our critical public safety functions: police, fire, EMS and code enforcement, instead of relying on another level of government (the village) that we all know has no where near the means to do such!
“The cost of these services is high! -And the village cannot sustain them operationally or administratively on its own, nor should it have to!
“The cost of these services must be spread over the entire Town of Tupper Lake.” He said it’s in the town where the most expensive properties exist and where the owners can afford to pay their fair share.
“Our police force needs to be functional 24/7! The rescue squad needs to have a paramedic on station 24/7! We are remote! Recently I had to call the EMS for a serious injury to my wife. The Tupper Lake Rescue and Emergency Squad showed up fast and got my wife to the hospital quickly.” But only with basic life support care, he noted.
“We are remote,” he iterated. “We are asking people to come here, to visit. We are making improvements to try to become a world class community. But are actions are not showing that!
“It is only a matter of time before volunteers cannot sustain the rescue squad at all, much less with critical, life-saving support like ALS (advanced life support).
“I don’t understand the resistance from the town in the battle over the police force because at the moment, I guess, it sits at the village.”
He next addressed property valuation and assessment.
“I want to state for the record the current planner and assessor has made significant efforts and I appreciate the changes she made when I brought to her attention a long list of delinquent property taxes and in particular those from deceased people. The work load left from many years of inconsistency and failure to reset entirely in the post-COVID market is overwhelming!
“One person, or in her (Jessica Eggsware) case one third of a person cannot complete the immediate action needed. The tax roll values are all over the board. Some are too high, some are too low and some shouldn’t even be on the tax roll. This critical function is the sole responsibility of the town and the action from the town sets the basis for what the two other local boards and the school board charge their annual levies.” He said he wanted to re-emphasize the fact that all local governments tax the same businesses, the same residents, based on the value of their properties. “That’s a point that I think gets lost when these governments independently plan their budgets!
“Regardless of what you might think, you are all sharing one pot of money!
“I urge you to hire one of the very competent and experienced private companies to complete a town-wide property reassessment. End the foolish practice of using less than full market value for property tax evaluations. Cease the practice of including ‘phantom property tax’ that you actually never are collecting a dollar from, but spend as if we are!” He said that practice of relying on tax revenues that never come because the owners don’t pay taxes is actually a form of double taxation through the county, paying again for the same levels of government we have already paid for!
Here’s how he described the current condition of the community:“Abandoned and disaster properties and properties in ruins all over town, a double digit million dollar sewer project on the horizon, inaccurate record-keeping and funding for under-charging and over-charging, burned out and abandoned properties around the new train station, continued problems of bad water all over the community, inadequate public safety, a school system that is on the edge of financial disaster, the village barely taking in enough to fund its own expenses, while attempting to manage our most critically needed services. The former Oval Wood Dish industrial property continues to sit abandoned, despite the village awarding to an out of town developer the majority of the $10 million DRI grant it received. What is our plan? What is our plan to address some of these problems?” he asked again.
“None of these problems can be solved in back rooms or bar rooms or single board rooms. There needs to be a unified effort! We need a town board that is not waiting for the village to fail and craft a collective plan to restructure local government that can serve the community well for the next century, instead of continuing a model that will fail us in the near future!
“We need one town, we need one tax, we need one government!” he concluded.
Supervisor Rickey Dattola thanked Mr. Jellie for his comments and asked the eight or so people in the board room that evening, if they had a questions or comments.
Bob Kenniston, who has attended a number of town and school board meetings in recent months, told the elected leaders “I have to speak up!”
“The big tax here, as far as I know, is the school tax.” He told Mr. Jellie he wasn’t quite sure what point he was making about the school because we have pretty good schools here. But it is my understanding that the cost to educate a student in New York State is higher than in any other state- as it has been for at least the past five years!”
He said he gleaned that information from the internet.
“I don’t know if you were suggesting higher school taxes” as a way to solve the district’s current financial woes, “or what you were referring to. I just wanted to make that point” about the high cost of education in this state.
“Our school taxes are very, very high- on the order of two to three times the cost of education in many states in our nation.”
“So to say we need to put more money in our schools, I state my objection to that! I think the school taxes should be lowered and I was going to tell school officials that tonight (at the public hearing on the budget), but it got a little late!”
Both the town board meeting and the school budget hearing were both that evening, both starting at 6p.m.
Mr. Jellie told him the school district is facing “a three to four million dollar deficit in the next few years and there is not nearly the funding to handle that deficit.
“The increase proposed by them this year (about 3%) will barely get them through this coming year. Our school district is on the brink of bankruptcy!
He said the budget summary recently prepared by the school superintendent and it contained information the cost to educate a student here is the second lowest in the entire Adirondack region, adding he didn’t know where Mr. Kenniston had got his information.
“That was the metric used by the school district leaders last year to put the fear in people, to get them to vote for the budget” which carried nearly a nine percent tax increase, Mr. Kenniston replied.
He said he found that compared with all schools in this high education cost State of New York, “Tupper Lake is about in the middle of the pack!”
“But we are two to three times the cost of what it costs districts in other states to educate their children!”