Shortly after 10 a.m. this Saturday, state Supreme Court Justice Kevin Bryant, SUNY New Paltz ’93, will deliver the commencement address to the college’s Class of ’23.

“It is a humbling experience and a great honor to be asked to address the Class of ’23 thirty years after I graduated from New Paltz,” he said.

He’s come a long way from Rondout Gardens.

Bryant, 54, says he will “speak from the heart” about life experiences that saw him grow up in near poverty in public housing in downtown Kingston, “amid crime, drugs and violence,” to junior college and then SUNY New Paltz and Albany Law School.

“My older brother (who has since passed) and our family were fairly well off until our parents split up,” he said. “My mother and I moved into Rondout Gardens. It was very difficult, difficult to focus on my studies. As a result, my grades suffered.”

A talented athlete, Bryant was an all-star basketball player at Kingston High School.

New Paltz was always in his plans, he said. “With my grades, I knew I couldn’t get into New Paltz then, less so now,” he said. But he learned that if he got a degree from a state community college, he would automatically qualify for a four-year school. He attended Hudson Valley Community College and what is now called SUNY Ulster, graduating in 1991. He entered New Paltz that September, majoring in political science.

Bryant met his future wife, Elena, while attending New Paltz. The couple has two children and two grandchildren. They reside in Ulster Park.

An “extremely significant” period in Bryant’s young life was working at the former Mother Cabrini Home in West Park during college. “It was a school for troubled boys, far worse than anything I’d ever seen. I looked at those boys and realized it could have easily been me,” he said. “When we had home visitations, some of them preferred to remain on campus. I was a mentor to those boys. They came to me for help and advice.”

Rather than pursuing a career in social work or career counseling, Bryant chose the law. “I got a sense of what the law could do, or not do. I found my calling at Cabrini, my purpose in life,” he said.

SUNY New Paltz nurtured that purpose, he said. “I had wonderful, supportive teachers and advisors,” he said. Perhaps a link to his future on the bench, Bryant listed former Supreme Court judge Vincent Bradley as a major influence in his life. “Judge Bradley was always there for me,” he said.

Bryant had an eclectic career in private practice — “a little bit of everything.” He has been an assistant public defender and prosecutor, town and city of Kingston attorney, single practitioner, insurance attorney, “a lot of things”

He ran for Family Court in 2014 in a Democratic primary and lost, but was elected to Supreme Court to a 14-year term in 2021.

Given just five to seven minutes to speak, Bryant said he hopes the extemporaneous message he will deliver from the heart “will demonstrate from my life story, where I came from, the struggles I had, how our school prepared me, that they can make it, too.”

Out of Her Lane

One of my more revealing takeaways from last June’s special Democratic committee election for county executive, decisively won by Jen Metzger over March Gallagher, was an overheard comment by a Gallagher supporter. “Well,” she said to another committeeperson as they headed for the door, “I guess they really told her to stay in her lane.”

Metzger then went on to defeat Town of Ulster Supervisor Jim Quigley in the general election. With no opponent, she gets a free ride in November. Democrats call it the “freeway of love.”

Meanwhile, Gallagher, a true road warrior, just won’t go away and “the Metzgers,” as they’re called, really don’t like it.

Fighting for headlines against the most aggressive public relations machine in Christendom, Gallagher has had to come up with some fairly inventive ideas outside of her auditing and watchdog duties.

Here we explore a largely ignored broadband-study citizen commission Gallagher appointed about a year ago to research the need for broadband access in the many underserved areas of the county. Public officials have been bloviating about this very serious public safety issue in annual “state of the county” speeches for years, but nothing’s been done.

Gallagher wanted the county to hit the road running when those millions of federal dollars for broadband expansion become available, probably in mid-October just before the presidential election.

Metzger, who shares Gallagher’s concerns on this subject, apparently has done nothing in this area, busy as she is stamping out fires around her domain. Rather than joining in the discussion, Metzger suggested, however politely, that the comptroller should in effect, stay in her own lane: spreadsheets, audits, counting beans.

Metzger in this context questioned if the comptroller has the authority under the County Charter to appoint study commissions.

One need not be by a Philadelphia lawyer to answer that one: Of course she does. And if Metzger isn’t going to address this most pressing issue, well then, somebody has to.

But as we’ve seen in this era of Republican political irrelevance in Ulster County, Democrats have nobody left to fight with but each other.

Trash the UCRRA?

The next bomb to drop in county politics could be the transfer of the Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency (UCRRA, or “uck-ruh” in common parlance) to the county executive.

UCRRA, set up some 35 years ago to deal with county solid waste, is governed by a part-time board of directors appointed by the county legislature. The RRA has done some good work over the years, like capping and paying for closure of town landfills. But of late the agency, which operates more or less independently from county government as a whole, has devolved into something of a back-stabby cluster muck.

Looming large is the need, if not so much the desire, to locate a county landfill somewhere in Ulster. For this, we need full-time adults in the room.

One Day in May

I’m watching two school board elections more closely this year: Onteora and Kingston.

Onteora has just gone through the divisive process of shutting down the Phoenicia elementary school. Overall, the district has lost half its school population in the last 18 years, the lifetime of a K-12 student. Something had to give. Parents, teachers and staff hope to elect enough board members to overturn the school board’s decision to close their school.

Kingston, the county’s largest school district, has pretty much flat-lined in student population in recent years, which for upstate schools is actually something to brag about. But Kingston will ask inflation-wracked voters to approve not only a $220 million budget, but another $162 million bond capital improvements.

The recent assault of a student by two others in the high school cafeteria will also be a factor in this year’s election.

One of the things I’ve noticed in reading stories about dozens of school district elections in our area is almost nobody talks about taxpayers’ ability to pay the bills. I’m no math whiz but I don’t get how some schools can raise spending by almost double digits and still come in under the state-mandated property tax limit, which varies from year to year and district to district, but typically comes in at about 3 percent).

I’m not sure what to make of this, but three candidates for the Arlington school board in Dutchess County hold PhDs in education. Future board meetings could be informative, and entertaining.