Reached at work late on Wednesday following a groundbreaking — and by far toughest — fourth defense of his original 1991 title as Dutchess County executive to earn a fifth straight four-year term, a tired but energized William Steinhaus was still talking with the rapid-fire, time’s-running-out cadence of a candidate in mid-bout. “If this is a test to see if I’m just that stupid or that dedicated to be at an office at 6 p.m. the day after an election ...” he mused rhetorically, before launching into a spirited rendering of what’s up next, sprinkled with more than a little well-deserved self-congratulation.
In an uncomfortably tight contest that saw him pull away slowly but surely as each set of returns came in Tuesday night, Steinhaus bested a game Democratic challenger, Wappinger town supervisor and Dutchess County Democratic Party chairman Joseph Ruggiero, by the final unofficial count of 30,877 to 28,915. For the mathematically challenged, that’s a 1,962 plurality, by far the slimmest margin of victory in Steinhaus’s long run.
“Right now it’s a combination of extreme fatigue and a high rush of adrenaline, looking forward to January,” said Steinhaus. “The challenge of governing a county as complex and as diverse as this at the same time you’re a candidate can be pretty daunting. By itself — I mean, I work 70-, 80-, 90-hour weeks usually anyway, but when you raise the intensity level it’s ... challenging. But, I have an enormous surge of adrenaline knowing that we can now aggressively and boldly move forward with many of our important initiatives for the coming years.”
At 90 hours a week, incidentally, Steinhaus’s $139,869 annual salary comes out to just under $30 an hour, about in the range of a decent physical therapist.
He’s jazzed about the new rail trail, one of the big, popular public projects that saw a well-timed pre-election groundbreaking. “As a matter of fact, as of late this afternoon we’re in the middle of our grading for our first stage of the rail trail project, and we hope to start putting asphalt down in two or three days. ... That’s really an exciting milestone for us, because that’s gonna really be a great quality-of-life amenity for tens of thousands of families.”
Lean, green fighting machine ...
Steinhaus’s voluntary well-testing initiative — which turns out to have been a reasonably effective counter to Ruggiero’s sustained volleys on the issue of the county executive’s veto of a mandatory well-testing law passed by the legislature in February — is also on the front burner. “Just today I got my first four or five maps, which are color GIS maps, printouts of our groundwater protection strategy on my comprehensive well-testing initiative, so we’re excited about moving that forward further,” said Steinhaus, just getting warmed up on the environmental front. “And then there’s our overall Dutchess Goes Green program, which is going to really expand and gain enormous momentum — I believe very quickly — over the coming year.”
Dutchess really does seem to have on green goggles these days, and Steinhaus doesn’t mind taking some of the credit. “What I’m most pleased about is that I’m starting to get a real sense that Dutchess Goes Green is changing the attitudes and behaviors of people themselves. I’ll just give you one example: on Saturday, I actually went down to our Resource Recovery Agency where we had one of our environmental recycling cleanup days — our hazardous waste days — and we had 450 cars come through, from 7:30 in the morning ’til a little after lunchtime. We have eight of those hazardous materials cleanup days a year. And I personally talked to at least two or three hundred people that day, just to understand what their motivations were, what their interests were and why they were there. And it’s exciting to see how we’ve changed people’s attitudes about protecting the environment just through education, and how people are buying into it. I saw more moms and dads, with their kids in the back seat, bringing in all these computers and chemicals and toxic items that not long ago would have just gone into the waste stream.”
Steinhaus was asked, by a member of the press who had heard repeatedly that he received little or no campaign assistance from the Dutchess County Republican organization, how he prevailed, essentially alone, against a concerted effort from the Democrats. Without really taking the bait, he found a way to address the issue in typically upbeat, Steinhausean fashion: “Well, I have a senior staff that I would match against any organization, anywhere. It’s a lean staff. They are phenomenal people,” he exulted. “I’m also fortunate that any time I’ve gone to community leadership, private sector leadership, and asked them to be part of one of my initiatives that I’m spearheading, that they’re always open and eager to do it, whether it’s a children’s health issue or a job creation issue or whatever. So I’m very optimistic for the future of the county.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” said the proud victor, “and it’s gonna be fun work, and it’s gonna be really important work for the future of the community, so I’m really excited. It’s humbling ... I mean this is a historic, unprecedented fifth term for an executive, which is a rare thing in the country, not just in New York State.”
Jail still an issue
Steinhaus is still benefiting among the tax-wary county public due to his unwavering resistance to the state Commission of Correction’s order that the county expand the jail by 300 beds. He has dealt with the continuing problem of crowding by working with the legislature to fund $3 million annually to transport inmates to jails outside the county. Ruggiero made an issue of the overcrowding, and it will doubtless pop up again over the next four years. To illustrate his position, Steinhaus simply points across the river to Ulster County’s recent experience building a $24 million-over-budget, three-years-late jail and sheriff’s office. “Well, that is an interesting window into Dutchess County’s future, and it has helped me keep people ‘sober’ over here — and I use that word in quotes, obviously — about making major strategic decisions like that, and what the implications are,” said Steinhaus. “Sometimes when you do things like that in the abstract, people can’t see the future. But in our case, all I have to do is say, well, you can just sort of look across the river, and it’ll give you a little window into the future. And they go: ‘Oh.’”
Regardless, he maintains Sheriff Adrian “Butch” Anderson should be the one to request any expansion. “The sheriff needs to find 17 votes in the Dutchess County Legislature,” said Steinhaus. “If he can show me 17 names on a piece of paper, then my door is certainly open to listen to him.”
Ruggiero could not be reached in time for deadline, but with the rigors of a post-election newsroom, we understand. We’ll try to catch up with him soon.