At the Mamakating Town Board meeting in early April, council members discussed something and then voted to enact it – even though the item was not on the agenda. At the board’s latest meeting, on April 16, disgruntled community members scolded them: not just for lack of transparency, they said, but also for voting “yes.”

The issue had to do with millions of gallons of untreated and partially treated sewage generated by the village of Bloomingburg. According to the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), millions of gallons of contaminated effluent were dumped daily into the Shawangunk Kill, which runs from Bloomingburg into the Wallkill River. The dumping was discovered by DEC inspectors in November 2022 and was still a problem a year later. The DEC said the system failure was due to non-biodegradable “wet wipes” that clogged filters, valves and pumps.

The village of Bloomingburg has said the problem was recently fixed, but Bloomingburg now wants a $5 million grant, distributed by Rep. Marc Molinaro’s office, to build a new sewage system. Just before its April 3 meeting, Bloomingburg asked Mamakating’s town board to write a letter to Molinaro supporting the grant request. The board voted aye and wrote a letter.

That request is what failed to appear on the April 3 agenda. And on April 16, so many people took the board to the woodshed that Superintendent Michael Robbins opted to extend the usual 30-minute limit for public comment.

First up was Catherine Dawkins. She wondered if any government entities involved with the sewage problem had bothered to test the contaminated water, and the areas it soaked, for viruses and bacteria. She noted that if the $5 million grant were divided by the 1,000 people who live in Bloomingburg, $5,000 would be spent on a new sewage system for each individual in the village – an exorbitant sum, she implied. She blamed the failure of the current system on “overdevelopment, poor management, poor planning,” and questioned why Mamakating should support building a new sewage system when it appeared that it, too, would be likely to be mismanaged.

Robbins gave a long, heated response. The item did not appear on the agenda, he said, because by the time the board got the request for the letter, the deadline for submitting it was very short – only two days after the April 3 Town Board meeting – so there was no time to list it on the agenda. He added that Mamakating has no jurisdiction over how Bloomingburg handles its sewage, but he is very concerned about “the brown water going into the kill” and has gotten countless calls about it from concerned town residents. “I’m more worried about the water than about who pays for it!” he said. He suggested that if people oppose the $5 million grant, they should write to Molinaro’s office and tell him.

Diane Mestanza was another of several people who gave comment. She excoriated developer plans in Bloomingburg to build a new, 200-acre development and predicted more problems with sanitation, given the mismanagement of the current system. Another woman expressed “disappointment” that the letter request had not been on the agenda. Transparency, she said is “key to communicating with the community,” adding that the speed with which the vote was taken was “controversial” and “I’m disappointed that you would move so quickly.” She suggested that the town could have put “bargaining points” into its letter of recommendation, such as asking for information about the proposed contractor. “I would put a lot of responsibility on that company,” she said.

Brenda Giraldi said that the town board’s failure to put the letter request on the agenda created bad “optics” among the community. “Now we’ve got our guard up,” she said “And that’s not a good place to be.”

“On this issue you disappointed us,” reiterated yet another woman. The commenting became a back and forth between critical speakers at the mike and Robbins responding that he was really worried about the kill and the “brown water.”

At the end of the discussion, Ward 3 Councilperson Matthew Mordas noted that efforts have been made by lawmakers to outlaw advertising that wet wipes are flushable or biodegradable. He encouraged people to write to state Senator Peter Oberacker to endorse a bill to that effect. “It’s a place to start,” Mordas said.

Other, less contentious items, were on the agenda. One came from Pine Bush Central School District Superintendent Brian Dunn and his assistant superintendent for business, Joseph Lenz. They urged Mamakatians to vote yes on the district’s proposed 2024-25 spending plan. Still in draft form, the upcoming budget is calculated at just over $141.5 million, about a 4.4 percent increase over last year’s budget. Lenz said that the school district is proposing a “worst case scenario” maximum tax levy increase of 2.96 percent, but the final figure will likely be less, depending on how much funding the state end up providing – closer to 2.5 percent. Some of the uncertainty, Lenz said, is caused by the fact that the state legislature was supposed to have its own proposed budget ready on April 1 but still does not have one.

The Pine Bush school budget election day will be on May 21, at two sites. The polling place for voters from Gardiner, Shawangunk, Crawford and Montgomery is Pine Bush High School, at 118 State Rte. 302 in Pine Bush. For Circleville, Mount Hope, Wallkill and Mamakating residents, the polling place is Circleville Elementary School, at 2000 State Rte. 302.