Some Powerful Arrogance In Potsdam!

If anyone wonders why the Village of Potsdam is on the verge of dissolution, he or she need look no further than the sheer, unbridled arrogance most recently on display in former Potsdam Village Trustee Helen Brouwer's letter to North Country Now.

She goes so far as to say it is the Town of Potsdam, and other towns as well, that should be dissolved not villages. She even mindlessly states that the New York State Constitution and its resulting state laws which created towns over two hundred years ago are wrong and should be changed.

Now that's some powerful arrogance.

But it's really nothing new for Mrs. Brouwer, or other Potsdam officials like current Mayor Ron Tischler or Trustee Steve Yugartis. These people display an actual disdain for having to deal with the voters, taxpayers and media that allow and enable them to serve in public office.

Their actions seem to say, "Why don't all of you ignorant people get out of our way so we can run things the way we see fit? After all, our background is in the university world and we are obviously much more intelligent than you, the unwashed masses!"

You'll remember that it was Trustee Brouwer who, along with the toadies on the village board and in appointed positions with the village, continually thwarted attempts to start businesses in Potsdam, especially if they were located around the corner from Mrs. Brouwer's home. That location is the current site of Mr. Robar's toilet garden, which sprang up after Mrs. Brouwer and her cronies killed every effort to grow the local economy at that location. 

Now she actually has the chutzpah to call town government "superfluous" and say that multi-millions dollars local governments can easily "be run by the highway superintendent and the clerk. ... It makes very little sense to destroy the core governmental unit, the center of population and services and turn over the responsibility to the larger unit that has little expertise and less interest in taking on the additional burdens."

Can you believe the unmitigated gall?

Have you forgotten, Mrs. Brouwer, that villages aren't really governments?

They are merely corporations who were originally incorporated to deliver services like water, sewer and trash pickup. Villages were never intended to be the burdensome, expensive, archaic little pseudo-governmental fiefdoms that most of them are today in St. Lawrence County and many other rural areas of New York State.

Mrs. Brouwer says it "does not make sense to dissolve the village of Potsdam."

But ultimately it is the voters who will decide that; not Helen Brouwer or her out-of-touch buddies who have kept their collective foot on the throat of new business and progress in Potsdam over the past few decades and allowed taxes to escalate to the point that any new residential growth in the Potsdam area happens outside the village or in places like Colton and Hanawa Falls.