Today’s the last day of Rick Scalera’s most recent two-year term as Mayor of Hudson. (I won't say his last day ever, because he could always run again if he doesn’t get the leadership positions he covets on the Board of Supervisors.)
Since 1993, Scalera has been ruling City Hall with an iron fist for all but two terms: 2001-2002, when he chickened out of running and put up Cappy Pierro in in place; and 2006-2007, when he again was afraid of losing and backed Danny Grandinetti. Both of his surrogates lost, mainly due to situation’s Rick created but ran away from, so that he could run two years later against his successor’s mistakes, and claim to have been “undefeated.”
Alderman Doc Donahue recently pronounced the signing of an agreement with Colarusso to mine around Hudson’s backup water supply as the Mayor’s “legacy.” It’s tempting to agree, because that document sums up a lot of what has been so wrong with his tenure as Mayor. Scalera’s tenure as Mayor is indeed well-encapsulated a sweetheart deal with a former campaign contributor, feebly negotiated with financial terms highly unfavorable to the taxpayers (what's $100,000 per year going to be worth in 20 years, with no increase in payments to account for inflation?). It represents Rick fumbling away one of the City’s most important assets. The next time there’s a drought, or your tax bill goes up, do remember Donahue’s pronouncement.
But Scalera’s actual legacy is bigger than deals like the one with Colarusso. His true legacy to Hudson is that of job-killer.
During Rick’s tenure, at least 1,000 local jobs were lost. One need look no further than an op-ed Scalera co-wrote with his then-consultant, Bill Lowenstein in 1998, to find the evidence. Stung at the time by criticism of the City’s mishandling of HUD grants, Scalera touted all the good that Federal and State grants had done for Hudson, by proclaiming a list of jobs these programs had created locally. His list of valued local businesses aided by grants included:
- Emsig
- Foster’s Refrigeration
- L&B Furniture
- Kaz, Inc.
- McGuire’s
- Schroeder’s Chevrolet
Today, with Scalera leaving office, all of these businesses (and more) are gone. Several of them continued to receive fresh infusions of public cash long after it was clear they could not survive even with assistance.
Others, such as Wittcomm —which Scalera announced in 1998 he was giving a big loan to bring 100 jobs to the City—never even opened their doors. The money went out the door, but the jobs never came in. (Later, the City forgave much of this debt in a complicated land swap among its own agencies.)
While these 1,000-plus jobs disappeared, others outside City Hall independently, without Scalera's aid, and often with his overt hostility, slowly built a new economy based on small, locally-owned businesses. Individual entrepreneurs steadily created 1-50 jobs each—bit-by-bit, and building-by-building.
As this rejuvenation of a once-abandoned river city gained critical mass about a decade ago, it started to attract still others to invest in crumbling real estate, restore boarded-up storefronts and homes, jumpstart main street activity, support the City’s flagging tax base, and giving people something to do both before and after 5 pm. Yet these same merchants and property owners were the frequent target of Scalera’s scorn and ire, and were thanked for their faith in Hudson by getting to the max with increased property taxes. Shunning those creating actual jobs with limited capital and sweat equity, Rick spent much of his time cheerleading for destructive, incompatible, foreign corporations such as Americlean and St. Lawrence Cement—neither of which offered any paid work except to those willing to help promote phony promises, imaginary pollution control technologies, and cooked job numbers.
Had Scalera been at all thoughtful about the changes our post-industrial society was undergoing, been attentive the many voices suggesting a different path to a new economy, considered open government and sound planning something other than a nuisance for his closed-door deals, and embraced the changes occurring around him, he might have had the best of both worlds: A lot less day-to-day on the job stress, and a lot more cooperation. The benefits of those changes might have been seen a lot more quickly, and been spread around more broadly. Hudson still has a long way to go, and that’s in part because Scalera has been fighting positive development and putting the brakes on progress for so long.
Instead he fought the changes, and closed his mind to new energy possibilities. Thus his legacy: Rick Scalera, Job Killer.
