To most people, a million dollars is lot of money. Even in an era when millionaires can say, with a straight face, that they feel poor, a million dollars appearing on the doorstep of most Americans would be a life-changing event. To the average personal economy, one million dollars would be treated with awe. For most, figures this large are never considered when balancing checkbooks or paying bills. But what is so rare in the economy of a typical Hudson Valley household is just another day in the office for many of our bureaucrats. A million here, a million there — it's all other people's money, and certainly won't come out of MY bank account.

So it is with great consternation that we witness the Village of Ellenville struggle with this seven-digit number, "suddenly" faced with a debt few of us can really comprehend. One or two hundred thousand mis-budgeted here, a misplaced decimal point there, add a few unsold parking lots and — bingo — you get one million dollars, money Ellenville spent that it never had. When the total budget hovers around $4 million per year, an error this large indicates that, somewhere, a complete breakdown in the management of the village's finances has occurred.

While the trouble has been brewing for years, it took the ascension of an actual accountant to the village manager's position to stand up and say, "Wait a minute, this is completely out of hand." We commend Mary Sheeley for taking this brave step, even as it points out the stunning inadequacies of her predecessor, Elliot Auerbach, who, ironically, is now Ulster County comptroller. But by now the damage is done, and, like our new president, it is up to her to fix an inherited mess. None of the options are easy. All involve a lot of pain, and to make matters worse, something must be done almost immediately.

And what solution are they proposing? A bailout, of course. The leaders who created this mess are asking their bosses — the people — to bail them out, by using money from a rainy-day trust fund, known locally as the "mountain money," funds acquired from the 1997 sale of the Sam's Point Dwarf Pine Ridge Preserve. "We overspent," they say, "we refused to lead, and now, instead of making the hard choices of painful cuts and managing the debt over time, we'll spend your nest egg and wipe the slate clean. Reset the clock. A do-over. Except now your nest-egg is a lot smaller." Oops.

And what assurances do they give us that this won't happen again? Well, one perpetrator of the 'crimes against accounting' now sits in a fancier office, with wider columns in his spreadsheet to fit more of those troublesome zeroes. Kingston is far enough away from Ellenville that his new inventions in the world of bookkeeping hopefully won't make it all the way down Route 209. Yet virtually the same village board still governs, the same mayor presides, and, most bafflingly, the same treasurer still controls the checkbook. How is this at all reassuring? They say they learned their lesson, that a million dollars really is a lot of money, our money, and they will be much more careful with it now. If you believe that, we have a parking lot you might be interested in…

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