Tonight, on the eve of Thanksgiving, the Common Council voted 8 to 3 to reject the proposed 2026 budget. Only Shershah Mizan (Third Ward), Lola Roberts (Third Ward), and Council president Tom DePietro voted yes to accept the budget. All the other members of the Council voted no.
What happens next is not clear. According to the Council's legal counsel, Crystal Peck, the Council cannot send the budget back to the BEA (Board of Estimate and Apportionment). From the time the mayor presents the budget, the Council has twenty days to make cuts to the budget or pass it. The Council cannot make additions to the budget, nor, it seems, can they simply reject it. If the Council does not act on the budget, it is approved by default. Mayor Kamal Johnson presented the budget to the Council on November 10. The twenty days are up on Sunday, November 30. One has to wonder why the special meeting to vote on the budget was scheduled just four days before the deadline, with the intervening days being a major holiday weekend.
The discussion that preceded the vote brought some clarity to the notion that two full-time positions were being cut from the Youth Department--a notion that provoked Youth Department supporters to come out in force to protest at the mayor's public hearing on the budget on November 19. It turns out that in his budget presentation to the BEA Calvin Lewis, youth director, erroneously indicated that there were two vacant full-time positions at the Youth Department: assistant director and athletic director (athletic director being a title change for a position that had been called "full-time rec attendant"). In fact, there was only vacant position: that of assistant director. When the BEA decided to impose a hiring freeze, eliminating the salaries for vacant positions from the budget, they unwittingly eliminated the salary of someone who was already working as athletic director, a.k.a. full-time rec attendant. As Councilmember Margaret Morris (First Ward) pointed out, this problem could have been avoided if the BEA had done a second round of workshops with department heads.
Although most of the discussion had to do with the Youth Department and its unfunded position, Linda Mussmann, Fourth Ward supervisor, rose to speak for the taxpayers, telling the Council, "You are asking the taxpayer to pay more." (The budget calls for a 3.9 percent increase in property taxes.)
Lola Roberts (Third Ward), who was one of the three members who voted accept the budget, bizarrely blamed gentrification for causing taxes to increase.
Margaret Morris, First Ward councilmember and Council president-elect, offered the most reasonable assessment of the situation: "We have been on a downward path in terms of revenue and expenses. We are not living within our means. . . . The bigger picture here is that we are not on a good path."
We can only hope that new leadership in City Hall can help us reverse course.
COPYRIGHT 2025 CAROLE OSTERINK
Did Shershah actually vote yes? I went through his three-second bit in the video several times and was unable to determine how he voted.
ReplyDeleteOne other noteworthy moment in this meeting was the incumbent mayor strangely justifying the tax increase with the decreasing number of residents that actually pay taxes. That struck me as maybe a reason to not increase property taxes.
The incumbent has exhibited the intellectual capacity of a goat. Good riddance.
DeleteI couldn't understand what Mizan said from the video either, which is why I checked with three people seated in the room, quite close to him, before writing this post.
DeleteIt seems strange that as population has gone down, the budget has gone up, that seems backwards.
DeleteAn easy instant fix that would avoid bickering would be to identify non essential, assistant and duplicate positions and departments and eliminate them. Then identify essential services, street cleaning and maintenance, snow plowing, garbage collection, water and sewer maintenance, street lighting, etc., keep those costs untouched, then simply cut everything else across the board at a percentage rate that balances the budget without a tax increase. Let the individual departments deal with it, reduce salaries, positions, programs, expenses, however they want.
Last night’s budget drama was weirdly clarifying.
ReplyDeleteIf a Common Council can vote down a budget but it slides through by default anyway, what Hudson has is not a legislature but political theatre, which is a strong argument for a charter change and a real City Manager...
Lola Roberts blaming “gentrification” for a 3.9 percent tax hike and years of fiscal drift is not economics, its shows her misunderstanding of how the world works or simply uncritical amplification of Kamal's scapegoating.
The usual prepared and principled members simply voted their convictions, without looking around the room first, which is what grown-up politics is supposed to look like.
And the Youth Department flap made the real priorities obvious: this was never about “the youth,” it was about protecting insider jobs, with Zachos’ cheerful ode to unionized positions landing as a quaint relic in 2025, a few years before the financial correction that is coming to Hudson, and everywhere else.
You know a job is not quite “essential” when the Youth Center director forgets to mention it, it falls out of the budget, and the best argument to resurrect it is not what it does for kids and that everything will break without that person, but that it is unionized.
Then having that case made by the same guy (obligatory and requested monthly mention of Zachos based on his continued involvement) who once turned scrutiny of “valuable jobs” into a dog poop Youth Center scandal is Hudson in a single frame: the drama and virtue is lavish, the governance and common sense is an afterthought.
See reference Dog Poop-Gate here:
https://www.hudsoncommonsense.com/kamalmob
Small towns preach virtue, vote graft, and blame outsiders.
So, it appears that come Monday, Tom & Kamal, as well as the do-nothings from the 3rd ward, will get the budget they wanted after all, though against the wishes of the reasonable people in the room which was everyone else. Tom's introduction to the meeting said it all:. "We're here to approve the budget."
ReplyDeleteNot to vote on whether to approve it or not. It wasn't a vote. And, essentially, he was being honest. Last night the budget was not even close to being approved, but it will have to be approved by Monday unchanged and without a vote. It will be Tom and Kamal's budget; it will be their legacies.
Last night's "vote" was a waste of everyone's time. It was meaningless because it happened far too late in the 20 day window. They all might as well have stayed home and not voted at all, because a no vote was nothing but a yes vote to pass the budget.
Something is wrong at City Hall, it seems, regardless of who is there trying to make the city stay afloat or improve.
If the city truly wants to save money, before they cut any services they should first cut the number of ward representatives per ward from two to one. Good luck getting that voted on.
Last night showed us another reason why charter reform is needed. Even the council, as the legislative body, is supposed to hold the power of the purse. But our current charter allows the inertia of poor governance to override them. This city has only two paths to financial health:
ReplyDelete1: We become economically and business friendly, get a planning board that doesn’t stifle progress, shut out the fake “nonprofit” grifters, no more pilot giveaways to wealthy developers, and build the revenue that we need through growth—and collecting the revenue that we’re already owed (late property taxes and parking tickets).
2. The “accelerationist” approach: we continue headfirst down the Kamal/Tom path until we go bankrupt and the state takes over and forces austerity.
Also, it’s quite clear that people who’ve never paid property taxes rarely understand how they work or the consequences they have on struggling families.
Just about yesterday I was revisiting that portion of the charter that deals with the budget and its approval. I thought I was missing something when I couldn't find the bits explaining what happens in the event of a council stubbornly rejecting a proposed budget.
DeleteI didn't miss anything. It's not in there.
Now I am asking myself if changes to the budgeting process in the charter could be done without referendum. I believe the answer is yes.
The incoming council should take a hard look at this and try to gain agency in a process where it currently doesn't have any.
It is the age-old “Free Stuff vs. Freedom” debate.
DeleteEvery generation has to relearn that freedom, with people pulling their own weight, creates more for everyone, while “free stuff” ends with everyone having less, and then nothing.
The world has run the experiment already: USA vs. USSR, South Korea vs. North Korea, West Germany vs. East Germany, and at home, Texas and Florida gaining people and jobs while New York and California bleed both.
~
Raise kids, not taxes. Fix streets, not feelings.
Also quite ridiculous that the fake controversy surrounding the Youth Department budget was caused by the mayor’s own hiring freeze and the Youth Dept director’s oversight? Kamal blames the council on Facebook, but asks them to save the forgotten employee via special resolution. Also, if the position title is being changed from “attendant” to “director” (quite the promotion in title btw), wouldn’t that make them part of management and no longer union?
ReplyDeleteAny future mayoral candidates should be required, in public, to prove and discuss what professional managerial experience they have, if they have any. Management experience would not be required of candidates, and not having any would not be disqualifying. It would just be informative for voters, because from here on out we cannot afford to have another mayor as unqualified as Kamal Johnson is and has been at managing anything, let alone a city of under 6,000. We can't continue down this road and expect to survive or even thrive. The days of Hudson mayors without managerial experience has got to end. Better yet, find the money to hire a professional city manager -- it will be worth it in the long run and the only way out of this mess and from it repeating.
ReplyDelete