Opinion

I grew up in the city of Fulton but since have moved away. I have always kept in touch through personal contacts or media. Recently, I was informed of a letter in the media about a lifelong friend and public servant, Legislator Frank Castiglia Jr. After reading the letter myself I felt a need to express my displeasure with a letter written by a Legislator Steve Walpole.

Legislator Weatherup makes a statement that I was wrong in my letter about the Fulton sales tax allotment discussion meeting with the Finance and Personnel Committee. In a past committee meeting Legislator Weatherup has said, “Why do we have to keep talking about something three or four times.” Again, I will say that having a degree in education I learned that repeating a lesson over and over again is the best way to ensure even the most challenging learner will finally understand the lesson.

The city of Oswego will make history this November. Either we’ll elect the youngest and least experienced person ever to serve as a New York state mayor or we can for the first time elect a write-in candidate or we can elect Oswego’s first woman mayor. This is the time to make the right kind of history. This is the time to elect Amy Tresidder.

Frank Castiglia, there you go again. Recently you saw fit to publish another letter to the editor, where you discussed the sales tax arrangement that the city of Fulton has with Oswego County. For unknown reasons, you reference some documents that I had that show some graphics to perhaps otherwise hypnotic numbers, and you mention that I did not provide to you “so everyone is on equal ground and they may refer to it as well.”

On Saturday, August 15, a free concert at the Bullhead Point pavilion, next to the lake, was being held. It featured Nashville recording artist Ricky Lee. As I looked into how this came about, I was told that as Ricky was traveling from Altoona, Pa., he stopped when he saw the lake. Reportedly he said, this would be a great place to hold a concert as he approached Paul and Kathy Cooper.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the local businesses and organizations that helped financially support the backpack program at the Oswego Middle School. These donations have allowed us to provide food for approximately 25 students over each long break (Thanksgiving, Christmas, February, April and Memorial Day).

Recently, the question of the sales tax agreement between the city of Fulton and the county of Oswego was questioned in a committee. It started as a question and has blown up into this movement to re-arrange or cancel this agreement. I cannot begin to explain how this discussion went from questions to the misrepresentation of now the County Legislative body is going to revoke the sales tax agreement with the city of Fulton.

I would like to thank former Mayor of Fulton Daryl Hayden and former Common Councilor Bob Weston for taking time to come to the meeting and defend the City of Fulton’s Sales tax allotment. Former Mayor Hayden did a fine job explaining how the original sales tax allotment deal was created in good faith between the city and county leaders in 2006.

I promised to tell you what the dialogue was like at the Infrastructure committee meeting. Well I’m going to give them to you now. I’m going to go from Worst to Least order. In the meeting after I had given my speech about how all I was asking for was to have the Chairman distribute the information I had given him and have the Rental Fee voted on again by the Full Legislative body. Win lose or Draw. Just vote again only this time with the full understanding of what we are voting on.