Ellenville Village Manager Michael Warren, who found himself embroiled in an increasingly heated debate about the state of village finances, said he was sacked on Tuesday. Mayor Evan Trent declined to comment, citing privacy issues.

“I was just fired by Evan Trent,” Warren, who had held the job for about four years, told the Shawangunk Journal in a brief interview on Wednesday. Warren said he’d cleaned out his desk and left his office in downtown Ellenville.

Warren’s exit comes as Ellenville edges toward a potential financial abyss, mostly stemming from its inability to collect property taxes on many properties in the village, which is surrounded by the wealthier town of Wawarsing but shares few services with it. Just this week, the village learned that it must wait at least another year before receiving funds it had been expecting from Ulster County to cover $235,000 of back taxes, dealing another blow to the village’s already shaky finances and raising the specter of insolvency.

County officials say the money Ellenville sought – first expected in January, then February and until this week, May – isn’t on its way because the village missed a deadline to apply for the funds in November, according to Assistant Deputy County Executive Evan Menist. Speaking in an interview on Tuesday in Saugerties before his boss, County Executive Jen Metzger, delivered her annual State of the County Speech, Menist said he didn’t know how the blown deadline occurred or who was involved.

Ellenville won the ability to see such make-whole funds thanks to a vote by the Ulster County legislature in October 2022. County staff said the village should have started the process at that time, instead of waiting for a year, to ensure that it could create an Inter-Municipal Agreement that would allow for the transfer of funds.

Now, it’s likely that the delinquent 2023-2024 taxes will be added to more than $800,000 in taxes that have gone unpaid for years, adding up to a bill of more than $1 million. Although Ellenville is considering other methods to retrieve those funds, including tax lien auctions and the outright auction of foreclosed homes, the unexpected delay in county funds threatens whatever slender hope the village had of regaining solvency before the fiscal year ends on May 31 and may force it to take radical steps to cut costs, including ending some essential services or selling village-owned property.

Warren has in recent months moved forward with plans to retrieve some portion of the outside taxes by hiring an outside firm, Auctions International, to sell foreclosed properties and return proceeds to the village.

To stave off insolvency, Trent, an IT specialist who swept to victory in November after two decades of leadership by real estate lawyer Jeff Kaplan, has launched the first steps toward a referendum that would allow the village to retrieve a further $500,000 from a reserve fund formed by Ellenville’s sale of a swath of land on the Shawangunk Ridge two decades ago.

That effort itself stemmed from another financial misunderstanding. In November, the village learned that a water bill of about $550,000, owed by the former owners of the Nevele Resort, had in fact been forgiven in a 2017 foreclosure hearing. That news when it was disclosed in January, prompted the scrambling that led to the referendum effort.

Should it be forced to furlough essential workers, the Ulster County Sheriff's Department, which maintains a small outpost at the village’s Resnick Airport, could be called in to provide police protection.

Menist, the assistant deputy county executive, said the sheriff's department is aware of Ellenville’s situation and ready to help, although a final decision would have to be made by Ulster County Sheriff Juan Figueroa. Sheriff Figueroa couldn’t be reached for comment.