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RFH 2010, Cover Stories, To the Editor

Letter: Crumb Supports Holcomb, Rossi & Shwartz

Sun, Nov 06, 2011

My name is David Crumb and I have been on the Town Council for almost four years. The last two years have been wrought with difficult challenges andissues that I wouldn't wish on anybody. I am writing this in support of going forward.

Going back to two years ago the Board was alerted to an incredibly high number of violations both major and minor by the New York State Controller's office. Including the lack of filing a Supervisor's report foreight years. This is the town's equivalent to your tax return. We found the way the town was doing business was not acceptable in many ways from how money was spent to what were the roles of the councilors were out of date and no longer able to meet the needs of the town.

We also found that the budgets were completely misaligned and people were grossly overtaxed creating a cash surplus of 1.2 million dollars. This caused a huge burden on the taxpayers. The budgets were miscoded so moneys were spent with little regard to the category they were in. This caused a convoluted budget with very little clarity.The other important issue we found was that villages of Hamilton and Earlville were being woefully overcharged with their share of the taxburden. When we did the calculations we made a 34% reduction in the tax rate for these villages. That means for years they were being grossly overburdened with their taxes.

Winston Churchill wrote that "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." It cost the town many thousands of dollars to repair the damage of our past. Do we really want to go back to the days of unfiled reports, overtaxation, bloated unclear budgets and over burdening the village residents with taxes for services they will never receive? We can't afford to go back to those days!

Gone are the days of partisan politics. We do not need the parties dictating our policy in the Town of Hamilton. The Village election taught us that it is the candidates not doctrine that is important. That is why I am supporting David Holcomb and Chris Rossi for town councilor and Eve Anne Shwartz for Town Supervisor.

David Crumb

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