The Chronicle has reported many times about the lack of transparency of some village officials in matters that affect the entire community. But we rarely, if ever, have had to write that a village official might not have been entirely truthful. Unfortunately, this is one of those painful times.
It involves the timeline in which the village processed, and the Planning Board eventually approved, an application from a cannabis business to open a dispensary at 370 South Riverside Avenue. The question here is not whether one is in favor or opposed to the dispensary: The Chronicle has taken no editorial position on that issue, even if we have published the opinions of some village residents who submitted Guest Editorials to us.
Rather, the question is one that all Croton residents should be able to agree about: The responsibility of village officials to keep residents informed of important matters, to tell the truth about them, to allow villagers to be involved in discussion and debate about them as early in the process as possible, to explain after the fact why some information was withheld, and to answer questions from citizens—including the local press—about what they knew and when they knew it.
In the case of the cannabis dispensary, village officials, specifically the Village Manager and the Mayor, have fallen far short of these basic democratic principles. Let’s get into the details.