The Overlook is conducting a series of interviews with candidates running for office in the Nov. 4 election, offering readers the opportunity to hear directly from those seeking to shape their communities. In this installment, senior reporter Jim Rich speaks with incumbent Shandaken Supervisor Peter DiSclafani, who is seeking reelection on the Working Families Party line against Democratic challenger Barbara Mansfield. [The following has been lightly edited for clarity and concision]:
What do you see as the single most important issue facing the town right now? And how would you address it in your first year?
Peter DiSclafani: Affordable housing and having enough housing, is very important, but a little above and beyond what a town government can do. What we’re trying to do with the [former Phoenecia Elementary School], that’s a direction we’re going to go trying to get a company like RUPCO or some other kind of entity in there to do some workforce housing or affordable housing. But that’s about as far as we could go. Entities like the county or the state have much more funding and resources to do that. The state owns three-quarters of Shandaken. It can find a suitable spot to put some kind of an apartment house or workforce housing. Would Shandaken be the best place to put multiple housing like that? I don’t know. We have a very small infrastructure. Where would the people go for their shopping? Where would they go for work? So in that sense it’s limited. It’s also limited in that we have very few places where we have municipal water and sewer, like Pine Hill. One of the big things in Shandaken that we battle almost on a weekly basis, if not a daily basis, is our rather antiquated codes. I’ve talked about that before and all of us on the board agree that we need to get the codes better.
I know neighboring towns have adjusted how they regulate Airbnbs in private homes. I’m thinking specifically of Olive, but there are others as well where they’ve put limitations on how units can be rented to non-permanent renters. Is there something along those lines that could bring it more down to the town level as far as control? Because I hear you as far as the influences of state and county on this issue. What are your thoughts on that? Is that even germane to the conversation?
Peter DiSclafani: When I first got into office, I was a councilman for six years, and we had committees working on the [short-term-rental] law. It languished for a couple of years because Covid hit. But as soon as I became supervisor, I made the push to get that law going. And I had been pushing the supervisor at the time from 2016, and even before I was back as councilman, that we needed a short-term-rental law. I’m a business owner [Editor’s note: DiSclafani owns Catskill Rose Lodging]. I have four small units, and I know that myself and all the other legal short-term-rental places—motels, hotels, inns—when [the popularity of Airbnbs] started that there was the feeling of ‘there goes our business’ and it went down and then it came back up because people were just coming up here. People always come up here and they find the best deal, the best place to stay for their budget and everybody has a different budget. But finally, when I got into office, we put together a pretty comprehensive law. I took it a few steps further by making sure that our fees were up there. That hopefully served as a partial deterrent, but it didn’t turn out to be that much of a deterrent. We didn’t have a high cap at the time because so many people had Airbnbs going or short-term-rentals. And we just wanted to regulate it or modulate it. As the years went by, we did, we started with 150-unit cap, and we’re down to 100 now. We’re doing that with matriculation. The license we made so that they weren’t transferable. And it’s coming. It’s getting more in control. So it’s a very long, arduous process. Sure, enforcement is the key, and we try to keep on top of it and try to keep enforcing it. Yes, some slip by that we don’t catch. It might take us a few weeks, sometimes a few months. We’re looking constantly. But to think that this the only thing keeping us from having affordable housing, or housing at all is, is completely different. Even when I was supervisor, my first term, which was about 20 years ago [Editor’s note: DiSclafani served as supervisor from 2009-2010], we were always a vacation community. Half of our residences are owned by out-of-town people and they come up on weekends. This was just a way for them to make some money.
Many residents feel disconnected from local government decisions until an issue directly affects them. How would you improve transparency and communication between the town and residents?
Peter DiSclafani: I don’t know. We’re on Channel 23. We’re on YouTube. Perhaps there’s a different venue or a different way we can get out and get the community involved. And it’s true, when somebody is personally impacted, then they hear about it and they come in and they watch. They get online, they see what’s going on. They see our website. I think we’re always trying to improve transparency. We’re always trying to improve—putting documentation on our public notices, having more clear documentation for projects coming up—so that when people go on our website and see Planning Board something, A, B and C, or at the Town Board.
Given budget constraints, what’s one area where you think the town could operate more efficiently? And where would you like to see taxpayer money better spent?
Peter DiSclafani: The sidewalks in Pine Hill, definitely. And in the last four years we’ve been working on a project I started almost 20 years ago when I was first supervisor. This stormwater retrofit program in Pine Hill. We had it engineered and it’s gone to committees from the DEP and to DC. It’s languished for all these years. I tried to revive it four years ago. And then as we’ve been doing, I guess in the last six or eight years, we’ve been doing these local flood analyses. We did one in Mount Tremper, we did one in Phoenicia. And right when I first got in office, we were in the process of doing one for Pine Hill, and that also gives us points to get funding. So that has inched along a little at a time, and it went from a stormwater project for the whole of Main Street to just let’s do the parking lot where the community center is. So that finally got an initial design in front of DEP. Right now, they’ve made comments on it that they need the engineers to respond to. Once that’s done, then we could move on to the next phase. These things, for one reason or another, either get held up in the engineers’ committee or in the DEP, and you have to keep poking them. So that all needs work, and I don’t know how to make other agencies move faster.
The town has had challenges in the past in coordinating with state and county agencies. Much of this centers on the fact that many town officials are volunteers, which has been an issue that’s been talked about whether it’s planning board, zoning board, etc., and there are limited financial resources. What are the ways to fix this and or make it better?
Peter DiSclafani: Myself and my deputy [Robert Drake] were at odds with why isn’t this happening. And then, as we’re working towards getting our annual financial reports (AFR) done, the last one that was done was in 2019. So our accountants did 2020 and then they are doing 2021. This is 2024! And we got to get moving. And so then we found out that the main accountant that we used had left their firm. But we didn’t find out about that for like three or four months. So we put a search out for another accounting firm. This was like a year ago. I found a company that Olive uses that’s out of Catskill, and we went back and forth. And it’s a year later, and we’re still not any closer to them. Well, maybe we are closer, but we haven’t done another year of AFR. How do we make things move faster there? You know, the highway superintendent [Eric Hofmeister] coined the phrase ‘things move at the speed of government.’ It’s like turning a large sea vessel in the ocean. It just takes long. And you don’t know what’s going on at that agency or that department.
Because they’re not dealing with just you in your town…
Peter DiSclafani: They’re not dealing with just our town. And we don’t know is that in an office with one person and piles and piles and we’re way down near the bottom? We don’t know. Everybody’s having trouble finding help. Everyone’s having trouble moving things efficiently. And we try in our government to help people to move things more efficiently. Anybody who comes in and wants to do a project, and they come to the zoning office or they come to the building department, the idea isn’t, ‘oh, let’s see how long we can make this last.’ We want this to move forward. But there are certain steps and certain things that need to happen to get a project forward.
Well, speaking of things taking a long time, cell signal has been an issue in the town, basically for as long as there have been cell phones. And despite the ongoing need for better service, whether it’s for individuals or for emergency responders, there’s still been pushback from residents as to where cell towers should and shouldn’t be built. How do you think the town should approach this issue moving forward?
Peter DiSclafani: It would have been very smart for the county or Verizon to come and sit with me and other council members and throw out some ideas of where they were thinking it would be a good idea to put a tower. But they don’t ask the boots on the ground, ‘hey, how do you think this is going to land?’ But for years, petition after petition that we’re sending Verizon and we’re sending the county saying we need cell service. And we’ve been doing that for a lot of years. And I understand they’re probably really frustrated. This is the first time they’ve come to us and we’ve said, hey, hold on, this isn’t a good spot.
What specific skills or experience do you bring that make you the best candidate, and why you, as opposed to Barbara?
Peter DiSclafani: Well, my experience is being a supervisor, right? I spent eight years as a councilman. So far, six years as a supervisor. I’ve interacted with a lot of entities, be it state, be it county. It’s not that we’re friends or anything, but I know how things move, and I know what to expect. People don’t mind being poked and being asked to do things in those other agencies. If you know how to be pleasant about it. I think all my budgets are within a 2% range and I’m always looking to save money. There’s a lot of moving parts in a town. You have the police department, you have the ambulance, you have the building department, zoning. There are a lot of different legal aspects of it. Budget reports that have to be made to the state. I’ve seen some of the comptroller’s reports from other towns when they do their audits, and we’re in the middle of an audit, or I’m hoping, the tail end of an audit. Mostly they criticize towns. Of course, there’s the occasional somebody siphoning money here or there, but mostly they criticize towns for hoarding money, collecting too many taxes and then having a chest they don’t do anything with. We have $400,000 to $500,000 that I have in reserve because I know we have to move our town hall. We definitely have to move the highway garage. But you have to know how to save that money. There are some towns that don’t have any money in reserve, and they’re in fiscal trouble. And that’s scary. Being a fiscal officer running out of money is my biggest fear. I’m always keeping my eye on the prize, which is making sure we’re fiscally strong.
Jim Rich is a senior reporter for The Overlook. You can reach him at jim@theoverlooknews.com.