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Princetown Planning Board chair pushed aside for ex-town clerk
Thursday, January 15, 2015
By Ned Campbell (Contact)
Gazette Reporter  


PRINCETOWN — A former town clerk who abruptly left the post in December 2013 has returned to Princetown government as chairwoman of the Planning Board.

Carol McClaine’s appointment to the Planning Board came at last week’s organizational meeting. This week, the town issued a news release announcing that her discrimination claim against the town had been dismissed by the New York State Division of Human Rights.

To make room for McClaine on the Planning Board, Town Board members Robert Myers, Louis Esposito and Douglas Gray voted against reappointing longtime board member Rose Norkus. Supervisor Michael Joyce and Councilman Joseph Jurczynski voted in favor.

Myers, Esposito and Gray also voted against reappointing Pat Bishop as chairwoman before voting to make McClaine the board’s new leader.

Bishop said Norkus was a knowledgeable board member who “wants to do what’s right,” and called the series of actions by the Town Board “cronyism at its worst.”

“Why would a board do that other than they want to get someone in there they can control?” she said. “Whatever their reason is, no one seems to know, because they didn’t give a reason.”

Myers said Monday he voted against reappointing Norkus in order to make a change to the board’s leadership, which he said he explained to Norkus before the meeting.

“It was nothing against Rose Norkus,” he said.

“It just happened to be that it was her position that was up this year.”

He said that Bishop, “an environmentalist,” was “too stringent” as the board’s chairwoman and also noted her ties to Supervisor Joyce.

“They had their own agenda — too much power and too much control — and we just felt we needed to make that change,” Myers said.

Bishop, however, said she ran the board “in a way that meets the requirements of our laws.” She also pointed to an award she received just last year — the 2014 New York State Planning Federation’s John O. Cross Award for Outstanding Planning Board Chair.

“I felt it was quite an honor to receive that, and I thought, ‘Well, gee, how many receivers of this award get basically fired a few months later because they’re not liked by the town board?’ ” said Bishop, who received a $4,900 yearly salary to serve as chairwoman.

Bishop, who joined the Planning Board in 2004, said she plans to remain on the board — her seven-year term runs through 2019.

Bishop also said her 30 years working as a research scientist for the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s water division made her qualified to lead the board, and that her replacement, McClaine, is “not particularly qualified to do the work.”

McClaine, however, said she is plenty qualified, having been involved in Princetown government for more than 23 years, which included a few years on the Planning Board.

“I really have been involved all this time, sometimes peripherally, and sometimes really involved,” she said.

She said Myers and Esposito — two Republicans who have been voting with the board’s sole Democrat, Gray — approached her in August saying they were going to “right the wrongs that had been done.” They later asked her if she would consider being the Planning Board chairwoman, she said.

Those “wrongs” were outlined in three complaints she filed against the town, all of which have now been dismissed by the state Division of Human Rights.

McClaine filed her first complaint against the town when she resigned in December 2013, a few days shy of being sworn in after defeating Sandra Fortune by seven votes in the election — leaving Fortune to take over as town clerk on short notice.

McClaine declined to comment on the latest claim, which she filed seven months after she left the town clerk position.

The claim was dismissed for lack of probable cause.

Joyce, the town supervisor, said the ruling reinforced his feelings that the charges, which claimed unlawful discrimination by the Town Board based on McClaine’s gender, were “frivolous to begin with.” He said McClaine’s three complaints, combined with two others filed by former town Judge Michelle VanWoeart and former court clerk Rebecca Selee — which were also dismissed — cost the town about $7,000 in legal fees. He said the lawsuits coupled with the votes to bring McClaine on as Planning Board chairwoman “leads me to believe that it’s just about cronyism.”

“It has nothing to do with the skills or what’s good for the town,” he said. “It’s textbook cronyism.”

Gray, the Democratic councilman, however, argued that McClaine is “who we feel is the best person for the job.”

“All I know is we’re doing what we feel is right, and that’s the way it is,” he said.

Quoted from 55tbird

Princetown has been a clusterf@ck for years...with nonsensical policies and blatant cronyism... nice to know things haven't changed.

Quoted from 55tbird

Princetown has been a clusterf@ck for years...with nonsensical policies and blatant cronyism... nice to know things haven't changed.

Quoted from Dirt2

Where does Princetown get their money from, Thruway speeding fines? Shouldn't they be absorbed into maybe Rotterdam?, or let the county take over.

Quoted from Dirt2

Where does Princetown get their money from, Thruway speeding fines? Shouldn't they be absorbed into maybe Rotterdam?, or let the county take over.