PUBLIC SAFETY COMMITTEE

Monday, February 9, 2026 - 9:30 AM

Ken Hughes, Chairperson

Davina Thurston, Vice-Chairperson

Chairman Hughes called this Public Safety Committee to order at 9:30 am with the following Supervisors in attendance: Clayton Barber, Matthew Brassard, Chris Clark, Timothy Follos, Kenneth Hughes, Mary Lamphear, Tracie McGill, Steve McNally, Clayton Menser, James O’Bryan, Timothy Pierce, Richard Preston, Cathleen Reusser, Matthew Stanley, Davina Thurston, Michael Tyler, Joe Pete Wilson and Meg Wood.

Department Heads present: Jim Dougan, Josh Favro, Emily Evatt, Judy Garrison, Roy Holzer, Mike Mascarenas, Mary McGowan, David Reynolds, Heather Sheehan and Dan Woods. Miriam Hadden was excused.

Also present: William Tansey, Michael LaVallie, Randi Swires, Shannon Doyle and Andrea Baer.

HUGHES: Good morning, everybody the time is 9:31, I’d like to call this public safety committee to order. Please rise to salute the flag. Good morning, everybody, let’s begin with the County Sealer, Mr. Dan Woods come on up sir.

WOODS: Good morning, everyone. If you turn over to the second page, you’ll be able to see my report for the month of January. I will give everybody a second to look at it, if you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer.

BRASSARD: Dan so, the Dollar General in Schroon Lake that’s probably the lowest accuracy I’ve seen on your reports 48%? Would you agree with that?

WOODS: It isn’t the lowest. I have had a 28% but yes, this one is pretty low. They ae running a skeleton crew right now, especially at Schroon Lake. They have employees out that are on paid leave and that has made it harder for them. While they were trying to explain to me why their pricing accuracy was not as good as it should be.

BRASSARD: I’m pretty sure like always they will pay their fine and keep on paying that and carrying on. Thank you.

HUGHES: I wisht there was a way in some municipalities that have an inspector that inspects a restaurant and they get a big, colorful neon poster at the entrance of that restaurant to let you know what their rating was. I don’t know if it is legal or not, but it would be amazing to have a nice big neon that says 48% for a certain business so people walking in would see that they’re not doing a great job not just this store but any store. One take away of many that I had from the introductory was that you’ve got to treat everybody with parody, equally you can’t bang on one if you’re not going to bang on the mom and pops and the mom and pops and the big guys as well you’ve got to treat everybody with a delicate balance you have to have.

WOODS: There definitely has to be a balance and it’s also with I know many of you brought up putting ads in the paper or putting it in public it’s a tiptoeing situation with slander and defamation and even after they’ve paid the fine that is still not admition of guilt all they are doing is accepting the fact that they have to pay money to make it go away it’s not actually admitting of guilt so we have to be careful with what we say, how we say it and how it’s publicly put out there as well. If you are wanting to put something in the paper, I would reach out to County Attorney before anything goes in to make sure that we are not getting ourselves into something on the wrong side.

WOOD: But if you just report facts and statistics and then let the reader, who has a brain, see those facts in one place, in one little county, in one state it would be very interesting to see if that starts the ball rolling. You don’t have to judge, you don’t have to do anything you just have to report how many stores, what corporation owns them all, all the facts and however long you want to do your comparison of what the findings were and what the payment was in fines and then it would be very interesting to see maybe that the fines are cheaper than actually having paid employees where you know have to pay them some kind of wage but you also have to pay the fringe, the social security all that. It’s probably a business plan.

HUGHES: Thank you for sharing that. If the county wants to go in this direction, then certainly I would still want to go through the county attorney.

O’BRYAN: What are the types of things that they are over charging on?

WOODS: It’s everything in the store so when I go into do a pricing accuracy check it’s 100 random items selected on the shelves and I will use their scanning system, and you match it to whatever the price is on the shelf to whatever it comes up onto the scanner. It is the whole entire store a lot of things that are up there honestly are things that don’t have price tags at all they don’t have an official home for them is what they would say when it comes up on their scanning system it tells you okay, this is supposed to be in aisle I21 well, when you go to that location sometimes they’ll put it on a hanger two aisles down trying to grab attention but don’t put an actual label up on there so it’s not labeled in one location they get it marked wrong for not having an actual price tag on it. When you claim overstock, you can claim overstock on the top shelf if everything is overstock once you put a price tag on one thing on the top shelf everything needs to be labeled. A lot of places are having problems with vendors, they are just coming in and shoving everything into every location that they can fit something and not actually putting it in the proper location so when you look at an item there’s 40 items there and they all say $4.99 when they are supposed to be ten spots down that’s $9.99 there’s a lot of different things that can go wrong and it’s not always the workers as much as it is the vendors but as the manager their job is to check and verify the vendor so there’s a lot of pointing fingers and blaming that’s going on and I have advised the management to not sign the paperwork accepting the goods in the store until they verify it’s in the right location. It may hold up the vendor for another half hour but it’s a lot better than getting a $20,000 fine.

O’BRYAN: These percentages just for today actually could be much higher based on really, only 100 count.

WOODS: Yeah, this is only a 100-count sample out of the entire store, which could be a lot worse. When I go through and I find, I choose one item and will check the, say it’s the whole entire end cap one item is wrong I will check the surrounding items just to let them know and there could be 20 items wrong in that one end cap I only write it up as one and I will put in my comment section entire end cap wrong so they know they need to look at the entire end cap but they are only getting fined for one item for that whole entire end cap so yes, it could be a lot worse if I wrote it in a different way.

HUGHES: Thank you, Mr. Woods. Any other questions or comments for him this morning? A couple of things that we might want to take a look at offline.

PIERCE: I’m just curious and you might have mentioned this before, but when you go places and you see the 48% like in Schroon Lake is that something you revisit relatively soon after? Thirty days or sixty days?

WOODS: So, when I talk to corporate at Dollar General, I told them that I wait at least four months before returning allowing people to be able to fix the problem. They told me that it is way too long and that it should be fixed sooner. Recently, in the last two years I’ve been waiting almost six months to revisit trying to give everybody a chance to fix the issues however, they are still not getting fixed in those locations but I’m not sure if we keep fining them heavily every two they are just going to close the door and people will not have a place to shop at 8 o’clock at night when their kids are sick and they need medicine.

WOOD: That’s exactly the kind of information statistically in keeping phone logs and logs like that that you can incorporate into your facts that’s not slander, that’s not a biased statement it’s just put that stuff along with the testing everything else. How much these companies actually make every year?

HUGHES: If we do begin to look into publishing publicly, I want to make sure there are maybe a precedent for doing that from somewhere else in New York State as well as passing through the county attorney. We can spend all morning on this, and I don’t want to, but the topic can be brought up, we are going to have a conversation about it.

THURSTON: I just had one thing and Dan touched on it and this is kind of not weights and measures, so I apologize for that but a lot of us do have Dollar Generals in our towns we have one in Bloomingdale. It is a godsend truly for a lot of people in the town even though we did get some push back when they first came in one of the biggest problems that I’m having this winter and that’s why I am bringing it up now to see if any of you are having the same problem, is with their snow plowing. So, the way it works is the manager is supposed to send in a ticket to upper management to get approval to plow the parking lot there and I’m just wondering if any of you are having problems with the plowing?

BRASSARD: No.

THURSTON: Are you being plowed first thing in the morning?

BRASSARD: Yes, for both locations Moriah and Port Henry before the store opens.

THURSTON: Before the store opens?

BRASSARD: Yes.

HUGHES: Respectfully I would like to focus on the county sealer’s report here and that conversation could be had respectfully with individuals. I want to make sure that we are not talking about a specific business in a positive or a negative way in this committee. I just want to be careful about that for the record. Thank you. Anything else for Mr. Woods this morning on his report?

O’BRYAN: Just the occupancy tax I see numbers here, but what are you seeing out there Dan?

WOODS: Occupancy tax we did really well. We haven’t fully gotten our number, but we are definitely over $7 million.

MASCARENAS: Yeah, it was projected last month that we were going to be at about $7.4 million in terms of that, so Dan is the enforcement wing of occupancy tax. He gets involved when we think that somebody is having an Airbnb or something like that, they are not paying tax on. Mike Diskin handles the finance of that but yeah, last meeting we were projecting $7.4 million for 2025.

HUGHES: Any further questions for Mr. Woods? You’re all set. Thank you. Board of Elections – Mary McGowan –

MENSER: Before we get into that you kind of skipped over the Veteran’s information.

HUGHES: I apologize. Thank you.

MENSER: Tim and I are both on that committee and we’ve been talking with the Veteran’s office, and we are going to start next month having a monthly report of how many people they have worked with in that month. The other thing that it is important to get out is that there’s a new award that was presented to be given to any Veterans that served in Korea back in 1954 most people don’t know about it but if you have a spouse or a child of a person who served in Korea they can apply for and have that medal awarded.

HUGHES: Terrific, that’s really nice and thank you for calling me out on that I appreciate that and I apologize for missing it. It’s nice to have a report from the Veteran’s office. Thank you and that’s you and Mr. Pierce, correct? I’m going to request Judy that we add both of their names to the report so that we will highlight that area. Perfect, thank you both very much.

Board of Elections – we had a false start but now we’re on our way.

MCGOWAN: Good morning, everyone. In your packet you have our monthly for January, and you also have a resolution to accept our annual report.

HUGHES: Okay, before we go into that resolution are there any questions on their monthly report for January 2026? Looks like there’s no questions okay we need a motion to accept and place on file the 2025 annual report as presented.

RESOLUTION ACCEPTING AND PLACING ON FILE THE 2025 ANNUAL REPORT FOR THE BOARD OF ELECTIONS. Menser, O’Bryan

HUGHES: Discussion? Being none, all in favor aye, opposed – carried. Thank you. Anything else you would like to add this morning?

HOLZER: A couple of things.

MCGOWAN: Also, on your desk I put a page showing all of the dates of the upcoming election whether it was petitions, early voting schedule and the election schedule. One of the things that is very important this year is that when you do circulate petitions there is a last day to get signatures which is different than the date you file. Anyway, the last day to collect signatures is April 2^nd and then the last date to file is April the 6^th so you cannot get signatures between those two dates.

MENSER: This is for republican and democrat. There will be separate information for independents.

HOLZER: Absolutely.

MCGOWAN: Right the independent one is listed there also the dates and their last date to file is the same as their last day to collect signatures so that’s not a problem there.

LAMPHEAR: Do we pick up our petitions now?

MCGOWAN: Yes, you can pick them up starting next week and Monday is President’s Day so we are closed so as of Tuesday we will have those ready.

HUGHES: I appreciate the cliff notes for the actually very complicated state Board of Elections document that comes out we had to go down the line and I find this is very helpful. Thank you for making that happen.

HOLZER: Good job Mary. A couple more things as Mary mentioned the last date to circulate petitions is April 2^nd do not circulate your petition that week to get signatures even though you are filing on the 6^th do not get signatures on the 2^nd it invalidates your petitions these dates are set by New York State not us. Speaking of another thing that is set with New York State is this Saturday some members of the staff will be working to allow constituents in our county to change their party enrollment if they wish so on that Valentine’s Day some of our staff will be working think of them as you’re doing your Valentine’s thing.

MCGOWAN: It’s love your party day.

HOLZER: Or not. An important thing to talk about Saturday after Saturday is done, we will have like sometime next week the actually signatures you will be required to have on your petitions like normally you would get petitions for Town of like North Elba you need 23 or whatever we will hold those numbers until after Saturday because people will be coming in to change their enrollments. I believe that’s it. You have our annual report if there’s any questions feel free to reach out to any of us, you’ll get the same answer, I’m sure.

HUGHES: Any questions for Board of Elections this morning?

THURSTON: Can you explain to us how the school elections take place?

HOLZER: Well, so thankfully we have nothing to do with the school elections. The only thing we provide the school is voter enrollment if they ask, we’re really not involved in the school elections at all.

THURSTON: So, who is?

HOLZER: It would be the Board of Education; the local school district would be the Clerk to the Superintendent or someone like that. School Board.

HUGHES: And possibly the School Board Association of New York State as well.

THURSTON: Thank you.

HUGHES: Any questions? I see you brought some of your staff members today thank you to you and thank you to them. Have a great day. District Attorney, Mr. Langey, I don’t believe I see him in the audience so we’re going to move on. Emergency Services and Josh Favro.

REUSSER: We need to do a resolution accepting their annual report.

HUGHES: We did that. Mr. Menser and Mr. O’Bryan first and second, and we had a motion.

REUSSER: For Board of Elections?

HUGHES: Yes.

REUSSER: I missed it.

FAVRO: Good morning. Are there any questions on our monthly report?

HUGHES: You have the monthly report from emergency services any questions for them on this report? Does not look like it at this time.

FAVRO: I do have a few resolutions to bring in front of you today. I did send out an email last week regarding purchase of a rescue truck for the Hazmat team did everybody get to see that email or have any questions on that? So, with that being said, I have a resolution to purchase a 2003 International Heavy Rescue truck from Hague Volunteer Fire Department with funds not to exceed $75,000 with funds coming from budgeted funds.

RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING THE PURCHASING AGENT TO PURCHASE A 2003 INTERNATIOINAL HEAVY RESCUE TRUCK FROM THE HAGUE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT IN AN AMOUNT NOT TO EXCEED $75,000, FOR THE EMERGENCY SERVICES HAZMAT TEAM WITH FUNDS TO COME FROM BUDGETED FUNDS. Stanley, Pierce

HUGHES: Discussion? I appreciated very much your explanation, the background, the rationale of how you’re working with DPW, how all of that is coming together and so that was very helpful.

O’BRYAN: Is it going to be a single axle or a double axle?

FAVRO: A single axle and it will fit the garage at the mill, the firehouse at the mill so it will be able to not have a foot of snow on it when we need to use it, and they can keep it washed and ready to respond.

O’BRYAN: Good, that’s great.

HUGHES: We have a motion and second on the floor. Any other questions on this resolution? All in favor aye, opposed – motion carried. Next.

FAVRO: I have a resolution to accept the 2026 Essex County Deputy Fire Coordinators, Fire Investigators and Deputy EMS Coordinator roster.

RESOLUTION ACCEPTING AND PLACING ON FILE THE 2026 ESSEX COUNTY DEPUTY FIRE COORDINATORS, FIRE INVESTIGATORS AND DEPUTY EMS COORDINATORS. McGill, Menser

HUGHES: Discussion? Any questions on this resolution? Being none, all in favor aye, opposed – carried.

FAVRO: We were able to get some grant funding as we normally do and a lot of you will notice that this department relies a lot on grants the radio system, our hazmat team, pretty much our infrastructure for 911 so this is couple of requests just moving money around for that reason. A resolution to increase revenues and appropriations in the amount $689,655.00, from the New York State Emergency Services ESInet, so it is an IP Network grant from resolution #287 from December of 2025. These funds will be used to replace the fiber line from the public safety building in Lewis to Willsboro trunk line and an additional fiber entrance into public safety building to make our 911 system redundant.

RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING A BUDGET AMENDMENT IN THE EMERGENCY SERVICES DEPARTMENT INCREASING REVENUES AND APPROPRIATIONS IN THE AMOUNT OF $689,655.00, FROM NEW YORK STATE EMERGENCY SERVICES IP NETWORK (ESINET) READINESS GRANT. Stanley, Menser

HUGHES: Discussion? Being none, all in favor aye, opposed – motion carried. Thank you.

FAVRO: And the last resolution I have is a resolution to increase revenues and appropriations in the amount of $1,266,796.00, for the NextGen 911 grant, resolution #116 from June 2025 and the funds will be used to upgrade call handling equipment in our PSAP to make us NextGen compliant. Clinton and Franklin Counties will be doing the same so we’re going to have a redundant phone system between the three counties as we do our CAD now it’s going to be a huge upgrade for us and we are going to be able to upgrade the UPS that runs both the jail and our emergency services our side of the building.

HUGHES: Could you please remind the committee of those PSAP?

FAVRO: Public safety answering port so our dispatch center other words.

HUGHES: Thank you.

RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING A BUDGET AMENDMENT IN THE EMERGENCY SERVICES DEPARTMENT INCREASING REVENUES AND APPROPRIATIONS IN THE AMOUNT OF $1,266,796.00, FROM 2025 SYF NEXTGEN 911 GRANT. Stanley, Pierce

HUGHES: Discussion?

STANLEY: Is this grant covering the UPS that we were looking to do through the buildings and facilities through DPW?

FAVRO: Yes. Right Jim?

DOUGAN: No.

MASCARENAS: There’s one of each right? So, one yes, one no.

HUGHES: So, everybody is right.

MASCARENAS: What you’re going to see here for new board members and old board members alike is you’re going to see an awful lot of these resolutions the first couple of months of monies moving forward grants, indoor projects don’t typically fall within the fiscal year, state fiscal years end in March, Federal fiscal years begin in October so you’ll see a lot of these types of monies moving forward they might not all be spent in one budget cycle so the remainder is pushed to another year so that’s why you’ll see the increase in revenue and appropriations in these amendments we don’t make it part of the budget process because they are ongoing some monies are constantly going in and out of those accounts. It’s not until the next year, we’ll bring it in.

HUGHES: And to your point, I appreciate you adding the resolution from last year as a reference in case anybody wants to go back and check that out. I appreciate it. Okay, motion by Mr. Stanley, second by Mr. Pierce. Any other comments, questions on this resolution? All in favor aye, opposed – motion carried. Anything else from you?

MASCARENAS: You do have one more.

HUGHES: I’m going to go to Mr. Stanley for that.

STANLEY: A resolution from the EMS sub-committee for authorization for the Director of Emergency Services to execute agreements with EMS agencies for the temporary use of county ambulances.

RESOLUTION AUTHORIZING THE DIRECTOR OF EMERGENCY SERVICES TO EXECUTE AGREEMENTS WITH AGENCIES FOR THE TEMPORARY LOAN OF COUNTY AMBULANCES TO BE USED WHEN THEIR AMBULANCE IS UNAVAILABLE OR OUT OF SERVICE. Stanley, Menser

HUGHES: Questions, concerns on that resolution that came out of that subcommittee meeting this morning? Being none, all in favor aye, opposed – motion carried. Thank you. Anything else for the committee this morning sir? Anything else for Mr. Favro this morning? Awesome. Have a great day, thank you very much. Good work. Moving onto Sheriff Reynolds.

SHERIFF REYNOLDS: I’m here if you have any questions I can come up.

HUGHES: Any questions for the Sheriff on his report this morning? Looks like you don’t need to come up thank you very much. Coroners – I don’t see. Probation – Heather Sheehan.

SHEEHAN: Good morning, everyone. You have my report and I’m happy to answer any questions you may have.

HUGHES: Any questions for the probation department and Heather this morning? Doesn’t look like it. Awesome, thank you so much. Have a great day. Emily Evatt – Public Defender.

EVATT: Good morning, everyone. I passed around my report this morning. If you have any questions for me, I’d be happy to answer them.

HUGHES: We have a report from Emily. Thank you very much. Awesome, I hope it didn’t take too long. Any questions for the public defender this morning on her report or anything that is going on in her office? Does not look like it so thank you very much. Have a great day. And Miriam Hadden, our Conflict Defender, is excused this morning so that concludes the reports from committees. Is there anything else that needs to come before this committee this morning? Then we are adjourned.

As there was no further discussion to come before this Public Safety committee it was adjourned at 10:00 a.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Judith Garrison, Clerk

Board of Supervisors