The Colonie Town Board meeting on Thursday, June 19, welcomed a special guest to discuss how the county is doing overall, and talk about all the new things taking place in the town.
County Executive Dan McCoy is making his rounds on the State of the County tour, stopping in towns throughout the county to discuss how things have been going and what lies ahead.
McCoy is on his third State of the County tour since he has entered office. The tour is a way for him to get out and see and talk to people he normally doesn’t get a chance to interact with.
“We raised taxes 1.6 (percent) last year. That’s the lowest we’ve been in six years at the county. We filed it under the cap, and we did it by working together, and it’s towns, it’s towns that can try and stay under the cap,” said McCoy.
A good deal of the address by McCoy was spent talking about how it is important that the towns and the county work together to accomplish goals.
“As we go forward in the future and continue to do things differently, we need to work together and … we need to collaborate,” said McCoy. “I can’t thank the board here enough because we’ve already worked on a ton of issues. We’re working with our DPW right now, figuring out stuff, how we can share services and how we can save money for the taxpayers at the end of the day.”
While much of 15-minute speech was meant to be uplifting, McCoy did mention some hardships facing the county and deficits that needed to be closed.
Colonie Supervisor Paula Mahan thanked McCoy for mentioning both the positives and negatives.
“It’s important to talk about the progress, which we all want to hear, but it’s important to talk about the things we need to work on. We have been working a lot together with the county and leaders all over the county, working together to find ways to make government more cost effective,” said Mahan.
Also on Thursday, the town board passed a resolution to accept a donation of $31,000 from Norman Massry Sr. for the purchase of a new DARE vehicle for the Town of Colonie Police Department.
“We’re obviously very pleased with the donation. We depend on our community support and we are lucky to have the support we do. This is one of the many donations we’ve had over the years. The donations help keep the money from coming out of the taxpayers pockets. It shows the level of support that our community has for our DARE program,” said Chief Steve Heider.