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Date Posted: Saturday, June10, 11:18:am
Author: CenHudDude
Subject: Mayor Torrance “Bully” Harvey

This morning’s Midhudsonnews.com has a headline “Newburgh Mayor loses his cool over construction delays”. The accompanying article, unfortunately, doesn’t nearly describe what happened at Thursday night’s City Council Workshop. Towards the end of that meeting, the mayor expressed concerns about how long it takes once the city council gives approval for a development proposal, until shovels go into the ground. He challenged the executive staff, in particular City Manager Venning and Corporation Counsel Kelson, to fast track the city’s approval process.

At this point, Ms. Kelson proceeded to explain that the City has already fast tracked the process. She explained that a couple of development projects that the mayor referenced and that the council OK’d did not have financing in place when the council gave their OK, and needed to seek tax credit financing and grants to actually build the project. This triggered the mayor and he went into a meltdown in which he totally bullied the Corporation Counsel. This aberrant behavior, which he has exhibited many times in the past, is totally unacceptable from the city’s top elected official.

To be fair to the mayor, the process of gaining approvals from the city’s Architectural Review Commission does seem to take a lot of time, which may or may not be justified. I don’t know how recently the mayor and executive staff have sat down with the ARC and expressed their concerns, but if it has been quite some time, they should do so again, if the mayor is able to control his behavior at that meeting.

Councilwoman Monteverde: You have said that you read our message board. Please feel free to weigh in on my comments. I am sure that you will agree with me that the mayor’s bullying of Ms. Kelson should not go unaddressed. At the very least, the mayor should issue her a public apology at Monday night’s City Council meeting. Stay tuned. We will see if the mayor has the courage to admit his unacceptable behavior and issue the public apology. For anyone who was not at the workshop, or has not viewed the video, please go to the 1:02 mark. That is when the Corporation Counsel begins her explanation that set the mayor off. Perhaps Councilwoman Monteverde can convince the mayor to review that portion of the video so that he understands why a public apology is necessary.

Kudos to City Manager Venning. He knows how to run a City Council Workshop. I enjoy hearing him calmly asking if there are any more comments from council members after rants from one of their colleagues, and then quickly moving on to the next item when there are none. He did that with the mayor last night as he had done earlier in the meeting after a rant from Councilman Shakur.

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