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SCHENECTADY
Appointee, gov’t critic in race for Council post
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter
Reach Gazette reporter Kathleen Moore at 395-3120 or moore@dailygazette.com.

    A five-month incumbent is facing one of the city’s best known government critics in this year’s Schenectady City Council race.
    Democrat Carl Erikson, who was appointed in June when Mark Blanchfield became city judge, will face off against independent candidate Pat Zollinger.
    Zollinger has run for City Council before, mounting an unsuccessful write-in campaign in 2005, and ran a highly-publicized petition drive to stop Mayor Brian U. Stratton from getting a midterm raise.
    She created her own party after the Republicans could not fi nd a candidate to take on Erikson.
    Erikson says he’s already started to implement changes that will attack blight and cut costs, having spend his first five months researching ideas and developing plans with city offi cials.
    “We need to find ways to streamline, make things more effi cient,” he said. “To create efficiencies in that people working accomplish more, rather than layoffs.”
    Right now, he’s focusing on ways to increase recycling. There’s a market for single-stream recycling — in which all recyclable goods are mixed together in one street-side container — and city offi cials have long thought that more residents would recycle if they no longer needed to sort their materials.
    “There’s more and more of a market as the economy of that industry grows,” Erikson said. “That has the potential to save us hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
    That’s the sort of changes he would bring, he said.
    “You’re not hiring more people, you’re not reinventing the wheel, you’re just making a change,” he said. “You do a couple of those a year, it’s going to keep taxes from elevating.”
    He also wants to improve the city’s neighborhoods by tackling the “problem properties” and tracking the city’s strategies to see what’s truly effective.
    “Create a procedure to track all problem properties. Categorize them: neglectful landlords, dead owner, owner can’t afford to pay. Have a specific procedure for each scenario,” he said. “Track it. When you measure performance, you tend to solve problems.”
    The method would also help the city determine where to focus its efforts.
    “You go after the biggest problem first, where the biggest gains will be,” he said. “Take the dead owner. How often does that happen? What percentage?”
    He said he can accomplish both the recycling shift and the tracking system in the next year.
    In the long-term, he said, he wants to focus on creating better housing by giving developers tax breaks to redevelop abandoned houses that the city has taken for nonpayment of taxes.
    Zollinger happens to agree with him on the blighted properties issue, although she would simply give developers the properties. She argues that the houses are worthless now because they don’t bring in taxes.
    She decided to run against Erikson for one simple reason: “Because no one else did.”
    “We’ve had government by appointment,” she said, referring to Erikson. “That’s not really an election, that’s a formality. It’s our not having a choice.”
    So she created her own party — the Schenectady Taxpayers Outrage Party — which will appear on the ballot on the same line as the Green Party. The two parties are not connected; other self-created parties are also on that line.
    She is campaigning on a promise to represent beleaguered taxpayers.
    She acknowledged that, if elected, she would be a minority of one against six Democrats.
    “But there’s also been times when some members have voted against something,” she said. “We’ve also seen [Council President Gary] McCarthy talking them into things. I would not be so easily swayed. I would be a reminder to the council. I would be a vote for the taxpayers.”
    She also wants to lease out the city’s new body shop to a private mechanic.
    “When the government provides jobs, it provides debt, overhead, and burden to the taxpayers,” she said.
    If elected, she said she would introduce legislation to eliminate all retirement and health insurance benefits for part-time elected offi - cials.
    “They are not employees,” she said.
    She would also try to persuade the council to restrict city-owned vehicles to a handful of employees, and eliminate cellphones altogether.
    “The fire chief, the police chief, they’ve got their radio systems,” she said. “Why do they need phones? That would save a huge amount of money.”.................>>>>..................>>>>..................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r01001&AppName=1

He thinks single stream recycling will correct Stratton's $13 MILLION deficit? The problem with garbage is transporting it to a dump by Syracuse. Go to a private garbage system or open a County dump. Everything else is a waste of time.

    A stark contrast between Pat Zollinger who offers concrete suggestions to cut exploding City spending and her opponent who offers platitudes. Had enough-YET?