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General News: State Orders Village to Provide Inspections
February 22, 2011
By Charlie B. Scirbona
The New York Department of State has given the village of Cornwall-on-Hudson until Friday to provide a plan for building code enforcement.
The village has been without a code enforcement officer since late December, creating a growing backlog of requests for inspections.
Village Mayor Joe Gross said he is doing what he can to work out an agreement with the town of Cornwall to temporarily share building inspection services with the village.
"Right now I'm waiting to hear back from the New York Conference of Mayors and our insurance companies to see if this can happen," Gross said on Tuesday.
Gross said he's also been in contact with the regional building code enforcement office in Kingston on the matter but he doesn't see the village board meeting to discuss the issue.
Town Proposed An Inspection Agreement in?January
"The board's expressed no interest in holding a special meeting to vote on the agreement, they've just directed me to sign off on the agreement," said Gross. In December the board voted unanimously to authorize the mayor to make a deal with the town for inspections services.
In January, the village received a proposal from the town to provide inspection services. Mayor Gross said last week that the village had not budgeted for it and noted that the town was asking for unanimous agreement on it. The proposal was never put to a vote.
Following the February 14 board of trustees work session, village trustee Mark Edsall discussed drafting a new agreement with Cornwall town supervisor Kevin Quigley that would allow for only a majority vote, not a unanimous one. Gross said this was not authorized.
"Edsall wasn't authorized by the board to negotiate any agreement, and as I understand it the town convened an illegal meeting to change the agreement," said Gross. He added that the meeting was illegal because the town didn't give public notice of the meeting.
Quigley said his wasn't the case and that the town board didn't have to vote to accept a majority agreement.
Mayor Questions Validity of Recent Inspections by Town
This presents a problem for the village because the town's building inspector was conducting inspections in the village on Wednesday according to Gross. He added that he wasn't informed about the inspector coming to the village and had no knowledge that the inspector was authorized to do any work there. This led the mayor to tell the town's inspector to stop work in the village.
Gross said that he didn't know whether the inspections done by the town's code enforcement officer were valid because of the situation.
However Quigley refuted this."My board got a request from the village to help them out with building inspections, I said 'yes, we would do it' and we sent our guy down there."
Quigley said the board and the mayor need to sort out the issue on their own.
"The bottom line is they need our help and we want to give it to them, but I?m not going to go in there and tell them how to do things," said Quigley
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