BY JENNA HUTCHINS
The town of Stony Point may have to find tens of thousands of dollars in their budget to pay for state mandated carbon monoxide detectors in town buildings. Town councilmen expressed their opposition to the mandate at Tuesday night’s board meeting.
The unfunded mandate requires the town to install CO detectors in every building the town occupies by June of this year. According to the board, there would need to be a detector in each building and placed on every heating unit. While it is important to keep people safe, the mandate has requirements that will most likely cost the town a lot more than if the town installed the detectors independently.
Councilman Tom Basile said, “It’s important for the public to understand that there’s a broken system here where Albany continues to force municipalities to pay for stuff…with no appreciation for our ability to actually pay for these things. While in concept this may be a good idea, this has the potential to cost the town tens of thousands of dollars…This is not budgeted money. This is not stuff we expected to have to pay for this year.”
The discussion on unfunded mandates turned out to be a brief civics lesson for the Boy Scouts who attended the meeting to fulfill requirements for a merit badge. Troop 19 from St. Peter’s Church in Haverstraw observed how local government works for their Citizenship in the Community badge.
Boy Scout Sam Granone said it was interesting to see how town hall meetings run and to find out a little about what’s going on in town. Scout Michael Love was also interested in the public input component of the meeting and paid attention to the organizational aspects of the process. Jason Maldonado and Corey Bruno also attended with their troop to see how the government process works. This experience will help them on the road to becoming Eagle Scouts.
In addition to the discussion of the CO detectors, the supervisor announced that Town Hall will be closed this coming Friday and Monday for Lincoln’s birthday and Presidents’ Day.
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