Former mayors back in the race
Former mayors Doug Olerud and Jan Hill are seeking a return to office.
Olerud and Hill are the only candidates so far to officially enter the race for mayor. That could yet change, and individuals have until Aug. 20 to file their candidacy.
If things hold, it would be a repeat of the 2020 mayoral race, when Olerud won the mayor’s seat over then-incumbent Hill.
The only other candidate officially running for office, as of noon on Wednesday, was Diana Lapham, who is running for borough assembly. Lapham previously served three years on the assembly, from 2013-2016. Lapham has run for assembly multiple times since then but has not won a seat. Lapham currently serves on the borough’s Ports and Harbors Advisory Committee.
There are two seats opening on the assembly. Neither of the incumbents in those seats, assembly members Craig Loomis and Kevin Forster, will be running for re-election.
There are four open seats on the planning commission and four open seats on the school board. No candidates have filed those races yet.
Two tax questions aiming for the ballot
Mayor Tom Morphet hopes to have voters decide on a decreased senior property tax exemption this fall.
Voters expanded the senior property tax exemption by ballot initiative two years ago. That vote doubled the state-mandated $150,000 of exempt property value for seniors to the current $300,000 of exempt property value. Morphet’s proposal would lower that exemption to $200,000.
To get on the ballot, the type of ballot initiative Morphet is proposing must get a specified percentage of signatures from registered voters. This year the number of required signatures was 297. That was a steep hill to climb. Tuesday mid-day, just over 24 hours before the final deadline to turn in signatures, Morphet had collected roughly 200 signatures. He was still on Main Street Wednesday three hours before the deadline collecting a final batch.
As of press time Wednesday afternoon, the borough clerk’s office had not yet certified the signatures and the petition for the ballot.
As mayor, Morphet could have also proposed the change as legislation to the assembly. The assembly may also put questions to the voters, like they did with last year’s seasonal sales tax proposal.
With that seasonal tax proposal, the assembly spent months considering different plans before settling on a final tax structure.
Morphet, however, said he started the process late, and wasn’t sure he would be able to get the assembly to sign off on the plan. Should they have come down against his proposal, he wouldn’t have had time to then turn to a citizen’s initiative, he said.
That left him circling town this week, clipboard in hand, trying to gather enough support to make the ballot. It wasn’t the easiest sledding, he said, with plenty of people unwilling to sign their support.
“This is a complicated thing,” Morphet said. “There are fiscal conservatives who were in favor and liberals who weren’t, and the other way around. There were husbands who signed when their wives wouldn’t, wives who signed when their husbands wouldn’t. Plenty of people said no.”
Morphet attributed that to the issue breaking down by age just as much as by political ideology.
On the one hand, he said, he believed in reducing the exemption to make the tax burden fall more equally across the age spectrum.
But he said he chose to maintain the $200,000 exemption in recognition of rising property values.
Some have proposed a means-tested senior exemption, in which residents would qualify if their income was below a certain threshold. Morphet said such a system would have been too complicated to get on the ballot and potentially complicated to administer.
He also wrote in a letter this week that the change was motivated by a desire for “equitable taxation and functional government,” and to raise more revenue to fund “essential services.”
Voters will also decide on the fate of the borough’s year-old sales tax plan.
A ballot initiative asks voters to repeal the seasonal sales tax system, just a year after it was passed.
The seasonal rates bump sales tax up to 7% in the townsite in the summer, and down to 4.5% in the winter. Groceries are exempt from tax altogether in the winter. If it’s repealed, the sales tax rate would return to how it was before last year’s election: a flat 5.5% rate in the townsite year-round, with no exemption for groceries.
Petition organizer Barbara Nettleton said she believed circumstances had changed since the vote, with increases in fuel costs, barge fees, and overall prices in recent months. Plus, she said, voters might not have understood the full ramifications of the new system when they voted last year.
“I think people started to realize that in the summer, when we recreate, you’re using a lot of gasoline, you’re buying more food, maybe you’re eating out more. I don’t think people felt the savings from the reduction in tax during the wintertime, and then they felt the pinch in the summertime,” Nettleton said Wednesday.
Nettleton’s petition was also not yet certified by the clerk and finalized for the ballot at press time on Wednesday.
The measure was passed last year with 573 votes in favor and 518 against.