Thursday evening, April 1, saw an unusual foursome take the stage at the Common Good, Ellenville’s bookshop-slash-cocktail bar on Canal Street. The occasion was a kind of meet and greet, organized by the Ellenville chapter of the NAACP, where ordinary voters interacted with Ulster County government figures. On hand were County Executive Jen Metzger, County Comptroller March Gallagher, District Attorney Emmanuel Nneji, and Sheriff Juan Figueroa. A good-sized crowd was in place, and, at the bar, Common Good’s Ellie could be heard shaking up the cocktails.

The proceedings began with explanations of what these people actually do. Which, when you think about it, is sometimes hard to nail down. “Comptroller”– what is that? County Sheriff, how far does that authority stretch? County Executive, again, what does it mean? If you can write down succinct descriptions of each role, then go to the front of the class.

It began at the top with Metzger, who explained that her job means running county operations. “We have 1,400 employees,” she explained, “and a $400 million budget.” Putting that budget together is a big part of the job, alongside funding and monitoring a lot of programs across the county. That means navigating the complexity of state and federal of grants, as well as loans and contracts. It’s a kind of wild zoo of paperwork that is essential for projects all over the county.

And then, she turned to the “problem-solving challenges” she faces, illustrating her role with one that Shawangunk Journal readers may be familiar with, to whit the longstanding lack of a warming center in the village where homeless people and families with a lack of heat in their homes can go to spend a winter’s night. The village lacked such an entity, although the Hunt Memorial Building’s basement was converted to an “emergency shelter” a few years ago, with a $2 million grant.

With a cold winter, people visibly wandering around the village, and reports of houses with the heat not working, it was time to get something done. This winter, it was, and a shelter was open and occupied every night of the end of the season. Metzger described managing this problem as part of her job. She made the key point that crucial to this was the existence of Ellenville Regional Hospital and the willingness of ERH CEO Steve Kelley to staff for the shelter to operate through the night.

Then came March Gallagher who explained that the county comptroller is the “fiscal watchdog of the county.” March also had some numbers to ponder over. “The county takes $600 million in Medicare and Medicaid payments,” she said. “Ulster County receives more than $900 million in Social Security payments, which go to about 43,000 residents in the county.”

Gallagher then took us back to the era before the county adopted the current executive-and-comptroller model of governance.

“The county was run by legislative committees,” she said. “There was no oversight. And that’s why I am here. I am the second county comptroller.” She shouted out the first – Elliott Auerbach, an Ellenville native, who was in the crowd.

Gallagher explained the job was a check against the possibility of disasters like the county jail and police center project in Kingston, which ran $30 million over budget, raised county taxes approximately 24 percent, and ended the legislative committee rule era.

She outlined “four buckets” that make up the work her department does. It begins with auditing every payment, every invoice. Was it in the budget? Was it paid correctly? Claims are audited “every single day.”

She mentioned finding $200 million sitting in an account not earning anything. Now, she reported, it gets $9 million in interest payments annually. “That’s the result of these deep dive audits.”

Then there’s the transparency aspect. All county employees’ salaries and contractor payments have been made visible on the county comptroller website. “You have access now to every payment on every contract that Ulster County is in,” which she believes is a “huge amount of transparency” for a county.

The final bucket is a new one. “We have just added capacity to do quality analysis to find out what we get for the money we put into services.”

Gallagher also touched on the fears over various statements made by the Trump administration regarding Social Security. She said she has spoken people who were terrified that they would lose that income. But she strove to reassure the audience. The county’s 43,000 social security recipients form a large group, she pointed out. “It won’t go easily, and this community will come together to support one another.”

In addition, she said she believes the state government will take extraordinary measures just like they did during COVID.

District Attorney Emmanuel Nneji went next. He explained that he must choose how to spend his resources, including what crimes to send for trial and what response to make to lawsuits. There are, he said, are about 4,000 major crimes a year in the county and his department has 20 employees. There is also a shortage of assistant district attorneys so “as you can imagine, we cannot prosecute everything. We have to make decisions about which ones to target and so we look first at crimes of violence, intimate partner violence and crimes that scare people.”

For “nonviolent” crimes, he said, “I make that decision, what to do with them.” Those decisions include whether the person requires mental health treatment or whether some form of “restorative justice” should be applied to “give them a chance to amend and carry on with their lives.”

Afterwards, County Sheriff Juan Figueroa made several important points. With 352 employees, including deputies, he explained that his office is responsible for the safety of the entire county. Part of that is having good relationships with other police agencies. Another, somewhat unexpected part of the job Figueroa touched on was finding ways to assist in parenting of the 300 or so children of incarcerated parents, mostly men, across the county.

Following those descriptions there were a number of questions from the audience. The first set out the issue of public transport back and forth between three counties with very different systems. UCAT buses are free, but they cannot take someone with a medical issue to the health centers outside Middletown in Orange County, which has its own (limited) public transportation system. Equally, there is no public transportation to take people across county lines into Sullivan County, where Move Sullivan provides free bus service on routes within the county. The question, posed to Metzger and Gallagher, was whether a deal could be struck to create bus services between Middletown, Kingston, Ellenville, and Monticello. That would require turning Wawarsing into a tri-county rural transportation hub.

Metzger responded by bringing up the “On Demand” transit plan, for which the county is hoping to get both state and federal funding. Getting enough ridership to sustain a service is perhaps the most crucial thing, particularly for a district as rural as Ulster. Metzger noted that “a lot of counties are doing this by using private companies” but she wants to try with the UCAT resources.

In fact, it will be part of the state Department of Transportation’s Innovative Mobility Initiative – a five-year pilot program to provide on-demand bus service in three areas of the county where there are higher numbers of residents without personal transportation. In the county's proposal, small UCAT buses would provide service to appointments, shopping plazas, and other local destinations, either directly or by connecting riders to buses on fixed routes. Metzger said that the county hopes to learn about the grant by summertime.

Next, came an inevitable question from Wawarsing. Poppy Cannon-Reese, who has led the charge against a proposed countywide landfill on Milk Road in Dairyland, Wawarsing. “Would you,” Cannon-Reese asked, “support such a landfill?”

The County Executive had to know this was coming, and she immediately stated the obvious aspect. “This is a political nightmare,” she said, with a long history. She recalled that the group proposing the landfill, Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA), was created in 1988 as a compromise between warring towns within the county who could not agree on an effective policy response to our garbage. And indeed, UCRRA never did, either, choosing instead to send all Ulster County’s non-recyclable waste to a giant landfill more than 200 miles away.

Metzger turned to her favorite positions on the issue, mostly about reducing the scale of the waste stream. By removing all compostable waste, Metzger believes the volume can be cut about 25 percent. But she insisted that the concept of “waste-to-energy” is blocked off for regulatory reasons because it leads to pollution. And incinerators are always located in “environmental social justice” area.

Metzger then brought up the statewide packaging reduction and recycling infrastructure act, Senate Bill S4246A, which will require firms selling packaging materials to develop packaging reduction and recycling plans for their products. The bill is currently awaiting a moment on the State Assembly calendar amidst furious lobbying.

Metzger did say, “it has to go somewhere,” but she balanced that with the prospect of a regional landfill, thus avoiding the political trap that a landfill presents for Ulster County.

March Gallagher threw another concept into the mix on this. She noted that the Comptroller’s office oversees the UCRRA. She added that UCRRA owes $39 million to the county, and wondered if Tracy Barthels, former county legislator who was deeply concerned about waste issues should be brought into discussions of this.

Leaving the landfill question unresolved, and now awaiting an engineer’s survey of the Milk Road site, the conversation moved to a question from the NAACP’s Maude Bruce concerning “discovery rollback.” This is a proposed change to laws in the state budget that will make it harder for defense attorneys to get cases dismissed on technicalities, effectively by allowing more room for discretion in the pre-trial process of discovery, when prosecutors and defense attorneys share information on the case.

Governor Hochul recently appeared in Kingston to promote the idea. She said that she would not sign the budget until the current discovery law is amended. Nneji supports her effort and explained that in his view, there are unscrupulous defense attorneys that seek out technicalities to destroy expensive cases, and that the changes would cut down on that problem. Figueroa also supports the changes in Hochul’s proposed budget.

After a salute to Janet Nuñez, Metzger’s eyes on the ground in Ellenville working to bring social services to the Trudy Farber building, Metzger closed things out by saying that the county’s website, which has been pretty poor, is now being refashioned and will become much more accessible.

With that the “performance” aspect of things drew to a close, the four representatives of Ulster County government stepped down to talk one-on-one with members of the audience. The question, of course, is whether this will remain a unique, one-time event, or whether our county leadership might return for another round at some point.