MONTICELLO — After months of deliberation and public hearings held in March, the Sullivan County Legislature finally made a decision on whether or not staggered terms should become practice.

At the Executive Committee meeting on Thursday last week, the legislators voted 8-0 against a resolution to stagger terms. Legislator Mark McCarthy was absent.

While the resolution was on the agenda, at first Legislator Nadia Rajsz presented a motion to table the resolution. However Legislator Alan Sorensen voted against tabling it and said, “I've had a lot of time to think about this, and the more I think about it the more I think it's not a good idea to stagger the terms.”

Legislator Scott Samuelson agreed and suggested it be up for discussion, and the motion to table was withdrawn.

Samuelson said it would make more sense to leave it as it is. He said, “It seems like a lot of our constituents and people have said they want this, but as we have studied it and looked at all the ramifications of it, it's a very complicated issue. There's a lot of things that are impacted by it.”

The proposed plan was to have some legislators serve two-year terms and some legislators serve the regular four-year terms, and then switch. The idea was proposed by the Charter Review Commission, which was a body of interested people who met in 2016.

During the public comment sessions in March, a few members of the commission spoke in favor of adopting staggered terms. One member, Kenneth Walter, said he was originally in favor but is now against it, saying changing the terms would be confusing to the public.

In a statement released by the legislature, they said, “After many months of consultation among ourselves, with the County Attorney's Office and with the Charter Review Commission who initially recommended this change, we feel the citizens of Sullivan County will continue to be best served by the system the founders of this Legislature put in place nearly 25 years ago. They established that all nine legislative positions would come with the same four-year term, and they determined that a more frequent turnover of elected legislators would not result in better governance. We agree.”

One of the reasons the legislators were in favor of keeping four-year terms is because a turnover does not necessarily mean better governance. For instance, in the last election there were six new members of the legislature. And in 1996, when the county went from a supervisor's model to the legislature model, there were nine new people sitting on the board.

“There are multiple advantages of keeping it as it is,” Sorensen said. “One being it gives the legislature effectively three years to work without any politics being introduced into the equation. It allows you to get long-term projects completed; the jail project being one that if you had people running every year it would have never gotten done.”

The legislators also agree that if there were a large turnover they would not lose continuity, as there is the leadership and institutional knowledge of the County Manager.