Plattsburgh politics are weird. It's an overwhelmingly white city near the Canadian border, surrounded by woods and farms where one often sees big Trump signs and the occasional confederate flag.Yet Clinton County, in which Plattsburgh is by far the biggest municipality, went for Hillary Clinton in 2016--the only county north of New York's I-90 corridor to do so.
Meanwhile, the city's Common Council is majority Democrat, with candidates who run spouting liberal catch-phrases such as "progressive" and "cooperation" and "community."
Colin Read was one of the candidates who mouthed those buzzwords during his 2016 mayoral campaign. In his swallowed professorial voice, he spoke of the importance of vision and planning in reinvigorating the city.
He even dropped the term "millennials" when he threw his hat in the ring last year, hoping to make Plattsburgh a place that could draw those young mysterious kewl kidz.
It was positive, feel-good rhetoric, and it helped Read narrowly upset the incumbent, Jim Calnon, last November.
So, one year into your administration, how's that millennial appeal working out for you, Mayor Read?
Young Mr. Bond is on to something. Read's tenure thus far has been nothing but gloom, doom, slashed programs and broken promises. He changed the City Charter with little discussion so that he could cut the City Recreation Department and the Engineering Department, all as a sop, he said, to credit ratings agencies and to prevent a tax increase. Then he raised taxes as the city's credit rating was downgraded. He improbably promised that the Rec Department's death wouldn't result in a cut in services, and then, less improbably, this happened.
For more than 20 minutes, the two public officials whine and moan and grouse on a publicly funded, universally available video stream. They complain about city workers ("the guy who's sitting on the back of the garbage truck" is "getting less productive over time") and mull giving employees "bribes" to claw back some of their benefits. They bitch about officials in the neighboring Town of Plattsburgh ("they tricked us" out of "millions of dollars"; "it stinks to high heaven"). Most alarmingly, with a "whaddayagonnado" callousness (starting at about 13:40 on the video), they conclude the City of Plattsburgh itself would be better off if it were "dissolved."
Dissolved. As in shut down, and folded into some other entity, presumably the Town of Plattsburgh--the place with all those crooked officials.
The mayor of the city advocates for his city to cease to be, and for handing his constituents over to people he clearly can't stand. That's bizarre. Even for Plattsburgh.
It gets weirder. There is a conspiracy theory that Read did the old "hot mic" trick on purpose, like canny Jed Bartlet in that "West Wing" episode, as part of a media campaign to gin up his fight over the Town's alleged chicanery. The convoluted controversy, which involves shared revenues and a decade-old PILOT program, is too byzantine to render a judgment on who did what to whom without a deep dive into documents, which Read has yet to provide. But it was the first thing local media reported on after the hot mic became public, and Read was able to cast Town officials as villains for a few days. So score one for the mayor, I guess.
Undermining the conspiracy theory is that Read, the guy who forgot to turn off the camera, ran to his fainting couch over the fact that his camera was turned on. He protested that he and Kelly (whose nickname shall forever after be "Hot Mike")--two city officials in a City Hall meeting room discussing city business--were having "a private conversation." The city scrambled to take down the conversation Thursday night, and the mayor cast blame on whoever put the video back on YouTube, saying it "breaks some sort of ethic" and is "obviously trying to harm the city."
Which is weird, coming from a person seemingly bent on harming the city by, you know, killing it.
Actually, maybe none of this is weird at all. Maybe it's just incompetent.