Roadtrip: Stockport August Town Board Meeting

On Tuesday, August 11th, we took a quick trip north and visited Stockport's Town Board Meeting to get a sense of how our neighbor is doing and specifically, if the rain on July 29th was as devastating as it was in Greenport.

What we've learned is that the Town of Stockport is ahead of Greenport in nearly every respect. Town Supervisor Matt Murell ran a tight ship and efficiently breezed through the agenda. He did not appear to fear public comments either as he opened up the floor at the end of the meeting.

The biggest item on the agenda, and the one that used up the lion share of the 45 or so minutes the meeting took, was a presentation by Susan Helden on a River Keeper cleanup event that occurred earlier this year. Around 30 volunteers had pulled all kinds of things out of the Stockport Creek and its embankments that weren't supposed to be there: Multiple soaked mattresses, a bunch of car tires, an A/C unit and on the order of 450 beverage containers of various materials.

This cleanup was by no means some sort of do-goodery of concerned residents but part of the Climate Smart Community program that Stockport had registered for earlier this year. To the surprise of no one, out of the only two municipalities in Columbia County that haven't registered, one is the Town of Greenport; the other is Livingston.

The CSC program encourages and incentivizes municipalities to work through a list of state-prescribed action items that in some way or the other make them more climate resilient. Actions taken earn them points towards either a bronze or silver certification. The list of actions can be reviewed here.

There is a very tangible benefit to earning points in this program as accrued points are considered by NY State when evaluating grant applications by municipalities. As it stands currently, Greenport would get no bonus here as it hasn't put in any work.

We asked Susan Helden how it was possible that Stockport had been so prolifically knocking action items off the list when they only completed their registration for the CSC program in the second half of March. It turns out that one competitive advantage unique to them is the fact that the county's coordinator of the CSC program, Don Meltz, is a resident of Stockport. But she also noted that a lot of the items on the action list are pretty low-hanging fruit.

Susan proceeded and explained how she leveraged the one advantage of signing up late to that program: She had studied the minutes of other municipalities' CSC task forces which allowed Stockport to avoid common mistakes made by other municipalities in the county.

It appears therefore that Greenport has a bit of catching up to do. Given that some amount of points can be earned relatively cheaply, it probably pays off to start right now. What it will initially take is a resolution by the Greenport Town Board to pass the CSC pledge. This is arguably a low bar but Greenport's Town Board has not excelled this year doing much of anything of value.

Good news is that Susan Helden, and presumably other members on Stockport CSC task force, seemed quite enthusiastic to provide Greenport with advice and help getting them going. All it takes now is a Town Board that can pass a resolution.

And to answer the question of how bad Stockport suffered through July 29th's rain: It appears to have fared better. This was the first Town Board meeting since the rain and it only was mentioned a couple of times in the report of Stockport's Highway Superintendent Tim Masten. It did not come up in any comments made by the public at the end either.