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People: Trustee Candidate: Charlie Moore
February 22, 2007
Fourth in a series of profiles of the six individuals on the ballot in the village Mayor and Trustee election on March 20
Charlie Moore, who is running for Cornwall-on-Hudson village trustee in the upcoming election, is a familiar face to many in the village and town. If you’ve ever had your phone line worked on in the past twenty years, chances are you will know Charlie as the "phone company guy.” If you are a regular at the Sidewalk Café, you will know him as one of the fellows who comes in for a cup of coffee and conversation nearly every day.
Charlie Moore, 60, retired from 36 years at Verizon last summer after a motorcycle accident on his birthday left him with a bad leg. Moore says he is busier now than he was when he worked for Verizon, but he still has time to provide service to the village.
“Some of the guys in the village, like Matt Clancy and Mike Trainor, know my feelings about the village and they encouraged me to run for office,” Moore says. His feelings, put simply, revolve around preserving the village atmosphere that so many residents say they love. In fact, his campaign slogan is “Save The Village.”
“I’d like to see the village remain a place where children can walk to the ball field and you don’t have to worry about it,” Moore explains. “I’m not opposed to change but I know what can happen with too much of it.”
Moore remembers how his hometown of Spring Valley, in Rockland County, once had a small town feel to it. He graduated from high school there, joined the Army, and served in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Purple Heart. He returned home and started working for Verizon, which assigned him to the Cornwall area, a place he came to love. He moved his family – his wife and three children -- to New Windsor in the 1990s and then to Cornwall-on-Hudson four years ago.
Moore’s co-workers at Verizon used to kid him and call him ‘the mayor” because so many people who passed them at a worksite in Cornwall would honk and wave at him. He never was involved in politics until now, he says.
“I don’t know how the budget works, with the all the departments,” Moore says, “I’ve got to get in there and see.” Like virtually every property owner in the village, he is concerned about taxes and doesn’t see an easy solution other than keeping a lid on spending. He doesn’t think that bringing small shops to the village will help much either.
“I don’t think a couple of small businesses will help the tax situation, you would need a big industry for that,” Moore says, though he doesn’t advocate that move. He refers to all of the small businesses on Main Street in Cornwall that struggle to make it and questions how specialty shops in the village would have any better luck attracting customers.
Moore sees the proposals to bring small shops to the Food Bank building as part of an effort to turn the village into a tourist spot and says that is not what people want. He says limited parking at the Food Bank would be a problem and suggests that the façade of the building could be improved by a painting a mural of appealing storefronts.
He has the same concern about proposals to develop the riverfront with restaurants or other businesses and says they would benefit just a few owners and not the people who live here. He shudders to think that the waterfront where he and his wife like to walk would be taken over by tourists.
When Moore was gathering signatures for his petition to be on the ballot, he spoke with people in Cliffside Park, some of whom are concerned about future changes there. Moore says he doesn’t see why the village has to re-claim a few inches or a foot of people’s property that it says is encroaching on public land. He’d like to see the streets paved in the neighborhood but fears that if you widen the roads it could become a speedway for young drivers.
He has seen the plans for the development of the former Department of Public Works building, which would be a mixed-use commercial and residential property, and he thinks it will improve the site.
When Moore talks about the reasons why he is running for trustee he is careful to say that he is not a mudslinger, just concerned about changing the nature of the village. Just like his slogan “Save the Village, “ Moore’s focus is to preserve Cornwall-on-Hudson the way it is.
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