THE GARY HERZIG STORY
'I’ve always been drawn to trying to make things better'
Editor’s Note: This profile of Gary Herzig’s life and career, published in Hometown Oneonta Feb. 6 of this year, has new currency after Oneonta Common Council named him mayor on Tuesday.
By JIM KEVLIN • Special to allotsego.com
ONEONTA – To help pay his way through Queens College, Gary Herzig drove cab nights and weekends.
“In New York City,” he said of the experience, “you see, on the one hand, extraordinary wealth – on the other hand, extreme poverty.”
That sensibility informed his career, from Inner City teacher, to Oneonta Job Corps director and, for the past two decades, an Opportunities for Otsego administrator, most of that time as chief operating officer.
“I’ve always been drawn to trying to make things better,” he said in an interview Saturday, Jan. 31, at Capresso, after the news that he was running for mayor broke the afternoon before on www.allotsego.com.
A member of the city’s Housing Task Force, Herzig said the issue that caused him to announce his candidacy in the Nov. 3 elections, is the city’s housing dilemma: “There’s a shortage, yet there’s a growing number of abandoned houses.”
Former mayor John Nader, who recruited the late Mayor Dick Miller in 2009 to replace him, said he is “very enthusiastic” about Herzig, adding, “I had encouraged him to run. I don’t know of other people who are interested in running at this point, and I’m focusing my energies on Gary as much as I can.”
“The range of things he’s been involved in for the past several years make him an ideal person to step in and be mayor at a challenging time for the city,” Nader continued. “His work on the housing plan, his work on the comprehensive plan – in all those capacities he’s done extraordinarily good work.”
