By CRAIG FREILICH

POTSDAM – Potsdam Town Councilor Rollin Beattie of Norwood so far is the only candidate who has announced his intention to run to replace Potsdam Town Supervisor Marie Regan when she retires at the end of the year.

Beattie said he has the endorsement of the Town of Potsdam Democratic Committee to run for the post that Regan is leaving after more than nine years as supervisor and several more as a councilor before that.

Beattie too, has acquired some experience in his 17 years on the town board and 10 years as a Norwood Village trustee between 1976 to 1986. He has begun circulating a nominating petition for the supervisor’s election.

“The big thing is money,” said Beattie as he reflected on the challenges he anticipates.

To help keep revenues and expenditures in line, Beattie said, he will “try to maintain the 100 percent assessment so we don’t have to have a revalue” on property, which would stir up the property tax pot again as it did in recent years when old assessments were thrown out and new ones were calculated.

He would also like to continue the program of upgrading aging equipment used by the town Highway Department.

“We’ve done a pretty good job replacing that equipment. Some of it is 25 years old or older,” he said. “We have one snowplow coming. That’s about $180,000, and we’ve got two or three more to go.” The challenge there, he said, is to “find money in the budget somehow and not raise taxes.”

Beattie was born and raised in Louisville. He retired from SUNY Potsdam as a project representative, working for the college on an assortment of projects. Before that job he was in road construction.

Supervisor Regan, who taught literature at SUNY Canton before her political career, says it has been “a nice long ride for nearly 20 years” since she first joined the town board in 1996. Ten years later she was appointed to lead the board when supervisor Pat Regan stepped down, and she has been re-elected every time since then.

“My husband and I feel it’s time to be able to visit family in the winter,” said the Massena native who moved to Norwood when she married Bob Regan, her husband of nearly 58 years. “We haven’t been able to get away for more than a couple of days for years.”

She said she has “crossed off most of the things on my bucket list,” things she wanted to accomplish while in office.

Some of those items were “small but important,” such as getting streetlights for the community in Unionville and getting grants to redo the bathrooms, driveway and the basketball court at Postwood Park in Hannawa Falls.

“I didn’t do any of this alone,” she said.

She said Beattie “has been here a long time. He knows how things work. If he’s elected, he’ll do a good job.”