Incumbent county legislator Kathy Nolan, 71, and challenger Robert Drake, 39, offered different visions about how to tackle housing affordability, taxes and cellphone towers, three critical issues for local residents, even as they offered similar views of how they’d represent Democratic voters in the 22nd District.

The two candidates, vying for the Democratic nomination to take on Republican Peter Friedel in November, laid out their positions at a forum on June 12 at Shandaken Town Hall. District 22, the county’s largest, encompasses Shandaken, Olive, Denning, and Hardenburgh. 

Nolan is serving her fourth non-consecutive term as a county legislator and chairs the county’s Public Works Committee. Drake, elected to Shandaken’s Town Board in 2021 and named deputy supervisor in 2023, has been endorsed by the Ulster County Democratic Committee and Working Families Party. 

Both said they sought to increase tourism diversity and revenue and advocated investment in flood mitigation infrastructure. The candidates also shared a commitment to communicating with local governments, attending community events and being accessible to residents. 

They differed on housing. While both said a lack of affordable housing was hurting the region, Drake proposed “gentle density,” or the incremental development of housing in the form of accessory dwelling units paired with the addition of small houses in residential areas.

He also cited his own involvement in a proposed project to turn the closed Phoenicia Elementary School into a mix of affordable and market-rate housing, a project Nolan also supports. 

Nolan, who agreed that gentle density is important, focused more of her comments on larger county initiatives. She commended the county’s larger housing-centered private-public partnerships and said towns should look at developing senior and worker housing projects. 

She also brought attention to the county’s Plus One program which gives residents with low to moderate incomes grants to build or revamp accessory dwelling units. 

Nolan’s broader countywide perspective emerged again when the two discussed how they would prevent tax increases if federal and state budget cuts leave the county with less financial support—potentially forcing it to raise taxes or cut services. She proposed an income tax surcharge for the wealthy, a step that the legislature is considering to help offset the risk of budget cuts. 

“It’s an idea worth considering,” Nolan said. “I want to have conversations with everybody in the community to see if that’s a good way to go.”

Drake, by contrast, said taxes are a matter of population density. 

“You can either cut services, raise taxes, or you can provide new parcels, and so the purpose of housing is in order to keep taxes low,” he said. “If you have more folks in the county to tax, then the tax rate stays low.”

The candidates disagreed about how the county supports emergency services. 

Drake, who spent much of the forum emphasizing the need for flood infrastructure, said the absence of emergency radio, which allows first responders services to communicate with each other, was going to get people killed. He said he felt unsupported by the county while trying to get a cellular tower built in Phoenicia, which he believes led to the project falling through. 

“That’s why I’m running for legislature,” he said. 

In addition to investing in communications, the district needs to be sharing emergency services with the surrounding communities, he said. 

Nolan spoke about what the county has already done to combat this issue. 

“Ulster County has invested $34 million in building out emergency radio services,” she said, “That’s a project that has been planned for a couple of years and is now being implemented and built out.” 

She added that the county has gone to the communities surrounding District 22 and asked them if it can use their emergency service radio, a project she said is rolling out soon. 

“The emergency service people are very happy with it,” she said.

County legislators represent their district in the Ulster County Legislature, one of the three branches in the county’s government. They work on county budgets and can vote on county taxes and other policies and they oversee the operation of county services such as the Resource Recovery Agency. They also oversee road maintenance and infrastructure, and work to provide services and resources to the county.

Kyle Bredberg is an intern and contributing reporter. You can reach him at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.