To the Editor:

I am writing to give the public a different view than the one Mrs. Regan presented at the town board meeting last Wednesday. I think her statement is very one sided, and doesn’t accurately reflect the mood of the meeting with the apartment developer at all.

Making a public statement mere hours after the meeting, before our board even had any chance to discuss the proposal, is a strange negotiation tactic when trying to bring a developer to town.

To say the village was reluctant or refusing to cooperate when only two board members heard the developer’s presentation is jumping the gun.

The developer put several items on the table that the village board had not been informed of before, and they certainly needed time to be briefed on this and discuss it.

Also, the developer was advised that there are three village board seats, and one town board seat being contested in the November election.

That, along with the dissolution vote, made it imprudent for the board to rush into any discussions before the election, and the developer understood that.

Mrs. Regan has repeatedly refused to make any commitments about services provided to the community after dissolution because she doesn’t want to bind a future board to anything; but she wants the outgoing members of the village board to commit to this project prior to leaving office, that’s very contradictory.

It certainly appears in the Courier-Observer article that the dissolution vote is being used as a political football to be tossed about freely to try to influence the negotiations with this developer.

The statements in the article that state that economic development can’t take place in the current structure are also very debatable.

We have proven mathematically, not through a subjective opinion, that development of undeveloped land through annexation benefits every single taxpayer in the town, county, and school district to essentially the same degree as development in the town outside, and there’s an additional benefit to the village taxpayer.

Annexation allows everyone to benefit more locally, and keeps more local money in the community. To say development can’t happen is contradictory when you view the Lowe’s location, which was annexed.

The Walmart and P&C septic failures also make it obvious why these projects need to have municipal sewer hookups. The village is a mere 4 square miles, and a large swath of that is river and college property.

The town, on the other hand is 100 square miles. To say that the town can’t afford to lose a few hundred acres of undeveloped land is absurd. The land, by the way, stays in the town, and the town continues to collect all town-wide taxes on the property. The town gains far more than it loses.

Mrs. Regan is fond of calling the town-outside properties “our land”. What she doesn’t say is that village properties are town land as well.

Both are taxed by the town, nearly equally in the current town budget. And what’s more important is that these lands are the property of private owners, and if they want to have their land included in the village, that should be their right.

To say the village is refusing to cooperate is untrue, and not giving the board a chance to even look at this project before making public statements concerning the meeting with the developer is premature at best.

I think that the town needs to let the political issues of the next election be sorted out, and give the village board a chance to look at this project carefully.

This project is a unique animal, and it needs to be approached prudently. Rushing into it, or trying to twist one of the other party’s arms is not the way anyone should be conducting business.

David Fenton

Potsdam Village Administrator