"They were trying to bully me"
We reached out to both candidates running for Greenport supervisor this year to see who would sit down with us for an interview. We didn't get a definitive answer from Clayton Clark but John J. Porreca Sr. agreed to meet with us and answer our questions.
Greenport Perimeter: John, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you grow up? What did you do during your professional years?
John Porreca: I grew up in Hudson on the 100 block of Warren St. I lived in a community that was basically made up of Italians, African-Americans, Poles and Jewish folks, each with their own church. We were all in that same area.
My mom was a housekeeper. She was a farmer back in the early days and they had a dairy farm in Stuyvesant. Her parents had migrated here from Italy. My father was in World War II in the US Army Air Forces (USAAF). After the war, he worked for the Post Office. Unfortunately, at the age of 16, I lost my dad to a major heart attack.
I was the eldest of four boys and had to help my mom so I started working for the hospital. In 1968, I became the Director of Environmental Services with the hospital and did that for 21 years. Around the same time I joined the National Guard. It was during the Vietnam war but I didn't have to go to Vietnam. I did have to go up to Attica during the prison riots tho to search the prison for any kind of contraband or weapons.
I was still taking care of my mother during this time. She didn't drive. We, between the four brothers, were eventually able to get my mom's driving license so she was able to go to the store. My mother lived at that home on Warren St till the age of 85, and that's when she finally passed away.
I married Dawn 20 years ago. I had bought a house on Union St. It was an old Queen Victoria house, right next to the police station. I then went back to college and got my teaching license for NY State and I taught vocational trades at Brookwood for twelve years, mainly property management. After that I home-tutored in the Hudson High School program for children, grades one through twelve for a period of five years. I also had a little bit of time as a sales rep for a national chemical cleaning company and for Valley Energy out in Claverack.
Greenport Perimeter: What was your entry into local politics?
John Porreca: In 1999, I became the alderman for the Third Ward in the City of Hudson, after a member of the Common Council had died in office. It was during that time that issues such as St Lawrence Cement came up for the first time.
I moved to Greenport in 2011. I was in the process of putting up the mailbox at my house in Lorenz Park when Robert Pendergast (then chair of the Greenport Republican committee) who I knew from Hudson suddenly stands next to me. He didn't know that I had moved to Greenport and so we chatted.
When the topic of the conversation turned to Greenport's then supervisor, Ed Nabozny, he bluntly asked me if I would be willing to run against him. That caught me a bit by surprise and so I ran up the driveway to consult with my wife Dawn. She had no objections.
And so I ran for supervisor in 2011. I wound up winning and beat Ed Nabozny by six votes. I spent four years, two terms, in office before Ed was back and defeated me in 2015.
Greenport Perimeter: What do you like best about living in Greenport?
John Porreca: The best thing I like about it is the area that I live in, Lorenz Park. It's a residential community and everybody that lives there takes care of their properties. They've had their families there and everybody seems to get along with everybody. It's not very fast-paced and it's more laid back than when I lived in Hudson.
But it's also urban and I love the fact that we have the stores right nearby, such as ShopRite and Walmart.
Greenport Perimeter: Conversely, what do you like the least about Greenport?
John Porreca: The taxes! Since I've moved here, they have increased. There are a number of seniors that are in all honesty struggling to make ends meet to survive. It seems like there's a lot of waste in Greenport.
Greenport Perimeter: What in your mind are the biggest challenges that need to be addressed?
John Porreca: We need to look at Greenport's population figures, we need to look at the traffic. We need to have a look at exactly what our infrastructure is like and what it can support.
I feel very comfortable knowing that we have these department heads in place who are trying to do their jobs. But then, there's others that are not doing their job, okay?
There's been a lot of empty store fronts in Greenport along Fairview Ave. We have to strive to see if we can rebuild that. We have to be very conscious of water, sewer and wastewater. Those are the huge structural problems that Greenport is facing, along with the eroding tax base.
There's the Mt Ida wellhead which is in Claverack but we own it. We need to reconnect that to our water system. If we were to bring that water supply from Mt Idea back and reconnect it, other towns might look into tapping into that water and pay for it. It would also give us sufficient water to support larger residential buildings and thus bring back up our population.
Greenport Perimeter: The rain event at the end of July, what would your message be to residents who were most affected by this, for example in Lorenz Park but also on Mt Merino?
John Porreca: I was out there on Lincoln Ave and saw the water flooding homes. I had people come up to me in my vehicle and ask "What are we going to be able to do?"
It's an old, old problem that was never taken care of and, in all honesty, got kicked down the road. That finally needs to be fixed. There's no alternative this time. As we develop more businesses in Greenport, we have to be mindful of the fact that we're drawing more water off of our wells and that we'll have more wastewater that we need to funnel away.
Our Town Engineer (George Schmitt) must be more online and be more involved with the town board. He needs to concentrate on establishing a relationship with us. Our Highway Superintendent, John Mausolf, has an idea and a plan (to fix the severed Mt Merino Rd). But he is not able to contact and connect with the engineer. We have to have an engineer that's going to help make that plan a reality and that's not happening right now.
Additionally, I believe we need a grant writer to help us find the money that this will cost. We look at the grants that Hudson receives compared to Greenport—we get very few. And it's more difficult for us since we share the same ZIP code with Hudson and up in Albany they can sometimes not tell the difference between Hudson and Town of Greenport.
Greenport Perimeter: You mentioned all these vacant storefronts along Fairview Ave which not only blight the townscape but also hurt Greenport's tax base. How would you try to address this?
John Porreca: I would address it by immediately creating an economic development committee. This committee would be responsible for securing new businesses but retaining existing ones. It would be a multi-disciplinary committee made up of business people, property owners, and ex-officio town board members. It would be similar to the Hudson Development Corporation (HDC) or the Columbia Economic Development Corporation (CEDC), but it would just be a committee and not a public-private entity with its own convoluted bylaws like a development corporation.
Greenport Perimeter: Here's a question that is maybe a little amusing and seems to mainly come out of Hudson where it pops up every once in a while. What are your thoughts on the idea of merging the City of Hudson with the Town of Greenport?
John Porreca: You know, it's kind of interesting because when I was supervisor in Greenport, that question did come up, right around 2012.
I don't know if the residents in Greenport at this point would find it acceptable to merge with Hudson. Back in the day, my impression was that in Hudson they were hoping they could lower their taxes that way.
Before one really considers this, maybe first start with shared services agreements. I did that back in 2015: Greenport went into an agreement with the county. We pay a nominal fee for the county to provide IT services to the town, including computer equipment. Water is another service we could share, assuming we get the Mt Ida wellhead back online.
Greenport Perimeter: What would you do in the first 100 days as freshly minted supervisor?
John Porreca: (laughs) Oh, my goodness! It's gonna be busy. We need to look at how the town does billing. There really appears to be no structure to it right now.
Transparency: We need to be more open to the public. People need to be able to speak at the meetings. It needs to be conveyed to the town board and the board needs to not push it down the road for the next six months but try to do something right then and there.
If somebody brings up a very valid issue, the town should be looking at it. We must be more open and welcoming to the thoughts and ideas of residents.
Greenport Perimeter: In 2015, a month before Ed Nabozny replaced you as supervisor, you had Greenport go into an agreement with the fish farm that would have obligated Hudson Valley Fisheries (HVF) to make available $190,000 to build a dedicated water pipeline from Greenport's south wells to the fish farm site. What specifically prompted you to create that agreement?
John Porreca: In 2015, I learned from our town engineer Ray Jurkowski and then-Water superintendent John Mokszycki that HVF was secretly drilling wells in the water district. They were attempting to supply water to their farm and they had drilled 17 or so wells already. They had come very close to hitting the mother lode of the town's south wells.
At that time I said, enough is enough. In all honesty, they were trying to bully me into agreeing to these wells. So that's what prompted this agreement that we would supply water through a separate pipeline directly from the south wells.
They would be responsible for building that pipeline per our specifications, or provide the town with the money, so that they would be getting unchlorinated water directly from the town's wellhead.
The agreement was signed on December 2nd, 2015, not quite a month before I left office. They had two years to build the pipeline or provide $190,000 to the town but they did not come through with that.
I had already left office. Whoever dropped the ball, I don't know. It was quite apparent to me that after I left office, whoever took office—first Ed Nabozny, then Kathy—were easily "persuaded".
There was also money given to Nabozny's campaign (a total of $9,100 by three NJ businesses associated with Fortune Metal Recycling, the company of John Ng's father) to kick me out of office because I couldn't be bought. That's why they got rid of me.
Greenport Perimeter: So your impression was that HVF were never really acting in good faith?
John Porreca: No, they were never acting in good faith. Honestly, when they came to Greenport, we were initially all very excited. I was excited.
Here we had Local Ocean (the fish farm that preceded HVF) just leave the town overnight and all the fish to die. I came down to their site on Route 9 and looked at all the fish and tanks that were in there; you had to see it to believe it.
There was one employee left and I asked them if they were still on the payroll and they said no. I had a contact number at the Department of Environment Conservation (DEC) and had an environmental conservation officer come down. He looked at things and declared immediately "I can't handle this. I need to get somebody else to take care of it".
Finally, DEC came down with a massive truck and got the fish out of there. I don't know where they took them. They were all salt-water fish, seabass and yellowfin tuna.
Greenport Perimeter: During your two terms as Greenport's supervisor, what was your experience as the Greenport representative on the County Board of Supervisors?
John Porreca: It was very interesting (chuckles).
It was a huge amount of work! The biggest thing was trying to get the sales tax numbers up by negotiating a bigger slice of the sales tax pie and thus get more money into Greenport. But at the end of the day, this distribution formula is based on the relative population of each town.
Chairman of the board at the time was Pat Gratton, supervisor of the Town of Kinderhook. I don't know why but he came to me and asked if I'd be willing to chair the Health and Medical committee.
I didn't even know what that was. Gratton explained that it's the committee that the Columbia County Department of Health and the Pine Haven nursing home up in Philmont report to.
Back then, the county was looking to sell that nursing home. They were also losing a lot of money in Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements. There was a formula by which you get those monies back from the government and the state and the county had no idea how to do that work.
So that was that committee. At the end, we succeeded: We sorted out the reimbursement snags and we also sold the nursing home (to Premier Health Care Management of Great Neck for $6.5M in 2015).
Greenport Perimeter: But you didn't just chair the Health and Medical Committee, right?
John Porreca: Right. I also chaired the Public Safety Committee and the Airport Subcommittee as co-chair with Art Bassin, the supervisor of Ancram...
Greenport Perimeter: ...and this is where the famous "Porreca plan" emerged and came about?
John Porreca: I didn't name it that!
At the time, I believe the county airport had five co-owners and they wanted to bring in larger planes into Columbia County even thought Albany wasn't that far. They wanted the airport to be a hub. But Art Bassin and I had seen documents from the FAA which stated that in the opinion of the FAA, the county's population did not warrant a larger airport, not at least for another 20 years.
The plans of expanding the airport also included putting a hotel on top of the hill, overseeing the airport. There were issues however: immediately north to the airport is the Meadowgreens Golf Course and in order to expand the airport and the runway, the county would have had to acquire parts of that golf course, via eminent domain. South of the airport meanwhile were wetlands that were home to endangered species—turtles and bats.
Ultimately, that expansion plan went nowhere but there was another problem: The existing runaway, according to FAA regulations, didn't have the prescribed buffer distance to the golf course so once again, that would have required buying some of the land the golf course was on.
Greenport Perimeter: And then you simply suggested to make the runway shorter and that became the Porreca plan?
John Porreca: Exactly. So what started out as an ill-conceived plan to enlarge the airport turned into a decision to make the runway shorter in order to comply with FAA regulations. It was the easiest solution that cost Columbia County the least money.
Greenport Perimeter: John, thank you for taking the time to sit down with us.
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