On Friday morning, Gossips showed up at City Hall for the Historic Preservation Commission meeting to find HPC chair Tom Swope there, alone, explaining that the meeting had been cancelled because there could be no quorum. The HPC has been one member short since Jamison Teale resigned from the commission several months ago, and Swope told me yesterday that it was recently realized that Nick Haddad's term had expired on July 31, 2011, so he could no longer serve on the commission. Since two other members--Jane Smith and David Voorhees--were unable to attend yesterday's meeting, that left only three members--not enough for a quorum--so the meeting had to be cancelled.
We chatted a bit about the vacancies--I expressing the opinion that since there were only two meetings of the HPC left in 2011, it would be nice if Mayor Scalera allowed his successor to appoint the new members--and Swope never disabused me of the idea that there were two vacancies. This morning, in preparation for writing this post, I checked the City of Hudson website to discover that one of the vacancies has already been filled by Rick Rector, whose term will expire on July 31, 2015.
This raises some questions: Why, if one vacancy had been filled, didn't Swope tell me? And why, if one vacancy had been filled, did they have to cancel the meeting? Four members are needed for a quorum, and with six commission members, two of whom were absent, they could have had that. Was Swope afraid that, if he told me about Rector's appointment, Gossips would take issue with having someone who is a close friend of both Swope and Eric Galloway serving on the Historic Preservation Commission?
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