Doug Withey Joins X101 on the Campaign Trail for Cortlandville Town Supervisor

Mike Eves: [00:00:00] It’s X 1 0 1, always classic. I am Mike Eves in the studio with us, Doug Withey, and he’s running for the Cortlandville supervisor. Doug, good afternoon and welcome to the studio. Good afternoon, Mike. Thank you. Thanks for being here. We’ve got some questions to, to go over with you and, we’ll dive right in here.

But, first one is, Doug, why’d you choose to run, for the Cortlandville supervisor position?

Doug Withey: Well, as you know, I was on the council, four years ago and ran for supervisor then. Didn’t make it. And so I got up and opened up the paper and read the, the people that are gonna be running for office. And there wasn’t a single person there other than Republican.

Now I’m not bringing that up. Republican or anything for any reason, but people don’t have a choice. If you only run Republicans, there’s two sides to every coin and so on. We, we’ve heard it, we’ve seen it all the time. So if you don’t run someone against the opposition, you have autocrats right there. And when it’s, we, we worry about that losing our, democracy and so on.[00:01:00]

Most people don’t want an autocrat, but that’s what that would’ve been. And, you know, my four years serving there before. It was very problematic trying to overcome, their ideas. It was really, truly, if you’re a Democrat, you are just bad. And, that’s one of the things I wanna bring to the, to the term is listen, we’re we’re all, we’re all Cortlandville people.

All right? So when people ask me when I’m knocking on the door, Democrat or Republican. I go, I am a citizen of Cortlandville and that’s truly how I feel. I don’t subscribe to either platform. I’m a Democrat because back when I was 17 years old, 60 years ago, it, it was like, duty bound. You get signed up.

And my parents were Democrats and so I went along with the Democrats. I knew nothing back then about politics or anything. I was a farm boy. I knew work and that was about it. So, so that’s the life behind the D, which I don’t subscribe to. Truly, I do not. I’m as [00:02:00] independent as one can be.

Mike Eves: All right.

No, no. Great. Now say you’re elected and what’s gonna be your biggest priority, day one in the office, Doug?

Doug Withey: Biggest priority, day one and all through my, term will be protecting our aquifer. Now that people, I’ve had people just since 1986 when we did the, you know, the aquifer protection permits and so on, worked hard on that.

And all through since then, it’s been, you know, Doug Whitley’s been doing the water fair that’s gone on for 33, 34 years now, and it’s a great educational tool and it keeps the aquifer in the forefront so that people realize it. Even though we haven’t had a crisis, ’cause Smith Corona was a crisis, even though we haven’t had one.

Well, what do we need it for? Well, that’s why it’s working. You haven’t had a crisis since there. ’cause we’re protecting it day in and day out. And everyone that deals with water, are doing the same thing. If you go to your faucet and you [00:03:00] can’t turn it on. All right. You got a phone number you can call, but if you go to your faucet and you turn it on and you can’t see what’s in that water, then you’re not sure if you’re, you know, being protected or not.

So on the, you know, n News program stuff there, you hear a lot these days by about, P-F-O-S-P-O-A. All right. These are cancer causing agents. Alright, now we’re seeing plastics in the water. You can’t see them. You can test for ’em, you can’t see ’em, you can’t see PFOS and PA. And so these, these protective measures that we have keeps certain industries and, you know, commercial, industries as well, from bringing that stuff in over our aquifer.

It’s the only water source we have and we need it. Our plant life need it. We need it. Life won’t go on in Cortland if we mess this up. And it came pretty close back in 86, 87 with Smith Corona. And that’s because of ignorance and that’s not a derogatory thing. That’s just the facts of the matter. [00:04:00] We hadn’t had to deal with it back then, and now we have, now we’re experts in that.

But you can’t let your guard down, you know, as the next generation’s come into place and you haven’t had an incident, they don’t know where to pick up. You know, and, you know, carry on, keep the pace going there on protection. So that’s one of the things with the education of, of, you know, the water festival, afer Protection Alliance that I started years ago.

And then when I retired, I started W2 operator training group, which is two. Teach the next generations of water and wastewater operators to, to a number of probably somewhere around 4,000, 4,500 operators that we have served through New York State’s, programs. And, we’re very proud of that. And it doesn’t matter where we go in the state.

They know W2 O. So we’ve had an effect and that’s, makes one feel good.

Mike Eves: That’s right. With us here this afternoon, Doug, with, he’s running for, Ville, town supervisor. Doug, just a couple more questions here. What are some of those issues you see are facing the area?

Doug Withey: Well, the big issues that you’ll see, [00:05:00] and I pointed this out on, on my Facebook, we’ve, we’ve got loss of small businesses and the real backbone of any community is our small businesses.

So we’ve lost, you know, GameStop, we’ve lost, Joanne Fabrics and a host of others, and no, they’re not big employers. But they’re important. Important. ’cause what happens if you can’t buy it here locally? You’re gonna go someplace else. And when you do, you take that sales tax revenue someplace else. So we don’t benefit from that.

And we need, we need all the tax dollars we can get. They’re, they’re legit. And we try to keep ’em fair, you know, throughout the county, the, in the cities and so on. But we’re being taxed greater than what the, the local. Economy can support. We’ve got people that are graduating from, you know, high school or later on college.

They wanna buy a house. I don’t know of anybody that’s graduating from high school that’s gonna have the ability to buy a house at 300,000 plus. And they wanna have a [00:06:00] car. And they need a car and maybe they’re pregnant and they’re gonna have a, a baby coming now they need daycare. And so on and so on. It just mounts up so they don’t have a real good chance of getting, getting to the point where I am today and where I was at back when I was 24, you know, owning my own house for the first time.

I don’t see that happening. So it’s where grandma and grandpa are gonna be supporting, you know, the grandkids and maybe grand great grandkids to give ’em a, a little step up towards their goal. And that’s, that’s kind of the, that’s a bad thought to have, but it’s there, it’s reality. And I have an idea on how to address that, but it takes a community.

Nothing’s gonna be solved with the problems we have in Ville without collaboration. And when I say collaboration, I’m not just talking on the board. I’m not just talking our community, but all around us is the rest of our county. We got the city and so on. I. They’re [00:07:00] in the same boat. You gotta realize that, you know, this is countywide issues that we’re gonna be dealing with.

So we need to work together and come up with plans. And I say plans ’cause there’s more than one element out there that needs adjusting. So, but come up with plans on how we can consolidate, how we can stretch our dollars, how we can share personnel and, and so on. It’s very important and there’s an incentive, from the state to do just that.

And you can get, reimbursed for monies to, pull the, pull that together, which is gonna be the right thing to do. It’s gonna be like the only thing you can do to, you know, stay, you know, to the level of, community that we have today.

Mike Eves: Right, right. And then, so our last question here this afternoon, Doug, what can you bring to the table as opposed, to your opponent?

Doug Withey: Well, there’s a lot I can say about him. I’ll try to keep it short and sweet. But, you know, back on the, back on the farm, we had, we had a chicken house and one time the fox got in the chicken house and we lost all our chickens. It just killed one. It killed them all. And I’m not sure if you even ate one of ’em.

We’ve had something [00:08:00] similar to that with, Mr. Leach, who eight years ago. Walked off, so to speak, with about $40,000 worth of assets from the town unpaid for. Alright. ’cause he is one of the good old boys and got away with it until I got elected and I found out about it and I turned the evidence over to the state controller’s office.

They came into an audit. And they established that outta the 40 some thousand that the highway superintendent said back then, $20,600 they could put into real numbers. All right? So that came to the board and the board recognized and accepted and filed the information, but they refused to go ahead and looked for restitution of the money that was given to him.

So when that happens, because good old boys, they were all Republicans at the time. And again, I’m not trying to bash Republicans, but this is how things happen. You get in this niche and you, you can’t seem to step out of [00:09:00] it until now. We have Frank Sue, and he did, he brought that money back into town. So I have great respect for Fran.

You know, this is the way things have to work, but you can’t just be one to go, boys just let it go. That was $20,600 of your tax dollars and they didn’t go after it, and that is wrong, very wrong. So it was me sitting there and, and, not having any say on it and so on. There. That was really an eye-opener that, hey, things just aren’t right here.

And again, they aren’t all bad, it’s just they look at their leadership and it’s truly look at their leadership and say, well, okay, must be, this is okay. That wasn’t leadership. It truly was not. And we don’t have leadership today, but you will have starting January when you elect Doug withy.

Mike Eves: Perfect.

Doug, anything, we’re almost outta time here. Anything else you wanna say before we, wrap this interview up?

Doug Withey: Yeah. So trying to heal. We see the division all across the national news day in, day [00:10:00] out, and it’s red against blue and so on. We are a president that won’t send money to a blue state.

They just make it tough on them, and we’re starting to see a little bit of that trickle down here locally. This division that we have between Democrats and the Republicans, it’s gotta go away, right? There’s gotta be an alternative to that, and I’ve got some ideas for that. The statement from Larry King years ago was, I learned more by listening than I do by talking.

That’s where I’m at. I’m a listener. Come talk to me. I will listen. We will take down notes and we will address those. That’d be first and foremost, is to lay those out when I get elected and start chiseling away on that.

Mike Eves: Yeah, no. Awesome. Thanks so much, Doug, for answering our questions here. That Doug Withey.

He’s running for the, Cortlandville supervisor position for X 1 0 1. Always classic. I’m Mike Eves.