To the Editor:

Editor's Note: Bryan Wolofsky, who resides in Montreal, Que., is the owner of the Meadow East and Swan Landing apartment complexes in Potsdam.

This past week a Letter to the Editor said that I was wrong for criticizing the Board of Trustees and that he had “nothing but respect for the Village Board members who work hard and do their best.”

He’s absolutely right.

The Village administration is doing everything it can to make the Town of Potsdam the very best it can be.

But the Village of Potsdam?

Not so much.

I invite readers to drive from Bicknell Building Supplies to WalMart looking at the major retailers and businesses on both sides of Route 11.

And now repeat, along Market Street from Clarkson Inn to the bypass.

To quote Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the other.

And a decade ago it was the opposite.

Is this the “good job” that the writer is implicitly referencing?

Or could it be the Robar-Toilets fiasco that the Village inexplicably chose to litigate for years instead of just working with him as mentioned in my previous letter?

Or maybe the part you respect is that the Village is fighting hand-over-fist to make sure none of us know how many tens of thousands of dollars all that litigation (and settlement) has cost you and I, the Village taxpayers, on the perfectly logical principle that “those paying bills (us!) should never know what exactly we’re paying, or why?”

Good principle!

And of course, we taxpayers should have no desire to know how much the Village is paying in legal bills to fight me for my original lawsuit for charging the 5 (now 6) apartment communities in Potsdam double the water bills that every other business in the Village is paying, not to mention the series of appeals that may follow?

I would genuinely like to know how much of my money those people, doing “such a good job for us”, are spending to fight me!

Oh, and my fellow Potsdam taxpayers might want to know that in my court case, Greg Thompson ludicrously stated in his affidavit that Swan Landing should not have standing in the case as Swan Landing tenants pay water and sewer, so Swan Landing LP never has to worry. As utterly ludicrous as this is, since the Village won the initial case, and despite us saying that this statement is nonsense since of course we have to pay water and sewer if any tenants don’t, I have decided that since the Village’s Representative (Thompson), backed by the trustees and the Village attorney all said I don’t have to pay water and sewer for empty apartments, and the judge found in their favor,

Accordingly, I will no longer pay water-sewer bills for any vacant Swan Landing apartments. And when the Village adds all the unpaid bills to my Village taxes next July, I will of course turn around and sue the Village saying “Look at Greg Thompson’s affidavit in a case the court found in favor of the Village!”.

Now what will happen in a case I should so clearly lose, but the Village Administration itself says I should win?

Do all readers now see how our Village's sheer administrative incompetence and lack of foresight continually puts us taxpayers in mess after mess after mess?

Or how about when I finally figured out why my water bills were so out of whack in March of 2019 and I called the mayor to discuss it and it took him until freaking November to return my call? (Really Ron! 7 months to return a damn phone call!)

Is this the “great job” to which the writer refers?

Oh, and by the way, because the editor insists my letters not exceed one million words, the above list of total Trustee screw-ups shall not even include a discussion of the Village Board’s multi-million dollar boondoggles as relate to the water treatment and sewer plants, nor the multi-million dollar contingent liability that is legally required to be on the Village’s Balance Sheet owing to the fact our police department strip-searched practically the one and only black person in town, following which Mary Rain relieved her bowels on the Constitution while the Village did nothing about it!

I invite the readers to decide who is right:

Do the Village Trustees “work hard and do their best”, or are they lazy (Again! 7 months to return a damn phone call Mr. Mayor!) pompous, entitled bumblers who have a complete inability to consider the consequences of any of their decisions, but still stand by them regardless of the legal and settlement costs their non-thought-out decisions engender!

There is an election coming up in a few weeks. Anyone care to challenge arrogant entitled #2 Steve Warr?

Bryan Wolofsky
Montreal, Quebec