Can County Board Chair

Name Committee Chairs?

Or Must Committees Pick Own Leadership?

By JIM KEVLIN • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com

COOPERSTOWN – As the 2017 committees of the county Board of Representatives began meeting this week, a wrinkle surfaced.

The question: Does county Board Chair Kathy Clark, R-Otego – or any county board chair – have the authority to appoint committee chairs, as has been her practice and that of her predecessors?

Just in case, members of at least one and perhaps two made motions to vote for their committee chairs.

According to county Rep. Gary Koutnik, the Health & Education Committee voted Tuesday to confirm its chair, Dave Bliss, R-Cooperstown/Middlefield.  Bliss made the motion himself, and it was seconded by Len Carson, R-Oneonta.

A similar vote may also have been called at the Public Works Committee, which affirmed Peter Oberacker, R-Maryland, as chair.

If this new procedure stands, individual committees could overrule Clark’s committee chair appointments, which appeared politically fraught this year when she removed Carson from the helm of the Public Safety & Legal Affairs Committee.  He had run against her for board chair at the Jan. 4 organizational meeting.

According to Koutnik and other reps, it was Bliss who discovered the county board chair is not specifically  empowered in the county board’s bylaws to name committee chairs.

If a power is not in the bylaws, it must be designated, the bylaws say, via Robert’s Rules of Order.  And Robert’s Rules require committees to select their own chairs.  (The Town of Middlefield had done it that way when Bliss was town supervisor there.)

Coincidentally, Carson included committees voting for their chairs on a list of action steps he intended to implement if he had toppled Clark.

Board Vice Chairman Ed Frazier, R-Unadilla, said there was no challenge when he assumed chairmanship of the Public Safety Committee yesterday.

At the meeting’s end, however, Keith McCarty, R-East Springfield, who is also a Public Works Committee member, raised the issue for discussion, Frazier said.

Until a legal opinion says otherwise, Frazier said, he will continue to run Public Safety according to precedent.

County Rep. Andrew Marietta, D-Cooperstown/Otsego, is a member of the Health & Education Committee, and said he asked County Attorney Ellen Coccoma for her opinion on the question, which was not yet forthcoming.

In looking at the committee makeups, it looks like Clark allies are sufficiently represented that the chairs could withstand challenges.

The one exception might be the influential Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, which includes two reps who voted for Clark – Meg Kennedy, R-Mount Vision, and Craig Gelbsman, R-Oneonta.  But the three other members – Oberacker, Andrew Stammel, D-Town of Oneonta, and Kay Stuligross, D-Oneonta, did not vote for Clark and have sufficient votes to overturn the Kennedy appointment if they chose.

The committee chair set meeting agendas, and also oversee the heads of departments within the committees’ purview.