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Oneonta Mayor Drnek details plans to grow Otsego County city

Downtown Oneonta, NY
https://www.facebook.com/MayorMarkD/
Downtown Oneonta, NY

During his State of the City address this week, Oneonta Mayor Mark Drnek detailed how he thinks the Otsego County city can increase its population by 1,000 residents. It’s a goal the first-term Democrat laid out in his 2021 mayoral campaign. In an interview with WAMC's Jim Levulis, Drnek explained why he thinks it’s a worthwhile effort.

Drnek: Well, it's a priority that, in fact, I'm not the first one to take on as a potential direction for the city. A lot of people have identified that before. It's an interesting thing. Since 1950, something or other, we were just looking at some documentation on this, the city's population has not changed. We've been pretty well static at 13,000 for about 70 years now. And as we look at it, as people have looked at it, it's the introduction of that number of people that would be transformative in a city of our size. Larger cities may not even see the needle move. But in a city of only 13,000 people, 1,000 people would make a significant difference to businesses, to the tax base, to the level of energy in the city itself, it'd be palpable. It would make a difference to the succession planning of so many of our various agencies and organizations that are currently hamstrung to determine you know, who is going to be taking the reins, who's going to take the baton for that moment when the current leadership ages out? And more. So I think it's a good goal. It's a goal that a number of people have pointed to in the past, but I've just taken this as my charge. And we'll see where we get with it.

Levulis: And where are your key focuses when it comes to trying to meet that 1,000 residents goal? What populations are you trying to focus in on?

Drnek: Yeah, so we are very, very lucky in the city of Oneonta again, a small city, we have two colleges, Hartwick College and SUNY Oneonta. They will typically graduate about 2,000 students, you know, between the two of them every year. Well, those students become alumni. And over the course of time, the thing about your recollections of your college that you went to, and that experience tends to get rosier with each passing year. If you couple that with the experience of, you know, living in a metropolitan area, working in a metropolitan area, the commute and all of that, including just the cost of living. The potential for us to reconnect with alumni and, and position ourselves as a likely candidate for the relocation, I think is probably going to be the best targeting of our somewhat limited marketing budgets and efforts. So the efforts are not limited, but certainly the budget is limited. So we need to be very precise about the markets we're targeting. And we're targeting, most specifically, a market that is basically 25 to 39-40-years-old. So people who have not yet quite gotten themselves so tethered to the communities that they've moved to. Haven’t gotten mortgages that will tie them down, haven’t maybe gotten themselves to a point where kids are already into school. You know, and so they may be a little bit more likely to consider a relocation. So we're going after those folks.

Levulis: And you mentioned there that population mostly, you know, post college. I did want to ask you though, being that you mentioned Oneonta, a college town. I wonder if you have any concerns when it comes to falling enrollments, specifically within the SUNY system. And that might not be specifically to the students coming in, but the impacts of falling enrollment as it would be on the institution as a whole so to say, staffing, faculty, etc.

Drnek: Yeah, it's certainly something that we're aware of and we are extremely lucky in the city of Oneonta we have these two colleges. They both got new presidents within the last year Dr. Alberto Cardelle at SUNY Oneonta and Darren Reisberg over at Hartwick. One of the great things about the two them coming in is that they are working together, which sounds like a no brainer, but it has not always been the case between these two colleges. They've got a very good relationship between the two of them and the two of them with the city. But what they are doing and what SUNY Oneonta specifically is doing is strategizing for kind of a new paradigm. So there will be a number, and I am hesitant to share information that's been shared with me at this juncture, but there will be a lessened number of students that are on campus physically. But it's very likely that they will be made able to maintain their enrollment at something along the lines of that 5,500 to 6,000 that they had been in years past. So that shouldn't be particularly, you know, it shouldn't really be impactful to administration or faculty or any of that support service for the most part. The place that is going to be impactful will be to the landlords, the student landlords in the city of Oneonta. Where they will see a diminishing number of student bodies essentially to fill their student apartments. And so we're looking at is a silver lining in a dark cloud in that it's likely to open up opportunities for us to be able to provide housing for these 1,000 folks that we’re beginning the marketing and solicitation of.

Levulis: You mentioned in your State of the City address that housing, there is nothing more important. You just touched on an aspect of it there. You said a lot of this work will fall or is falling at the hands of the Housing Commission. What avenues is that board pursuing specifically when it comes to this growth effort of gaining residents?

Drnek: Yeah, well, so what we have done is we've broken our housing commission down into, it's a very kind of, I think, unique take on this commission. It's a seven-member commission. But each commissioner winds up becoming a liaison to a work group and each work group has a specific charge that's unique to that workgroup. And then they bring the efforts of that group through its last meetings back to the commission for conversation and some vetting and some, maybe redirection or refinement that goes then back to the work groups in hopes that they will ultimately be generating proposals that will go through the commission, and then to council for action. So we have a lot of people who are working on the problems, not just the typical seven people sitting around in the housing commission, but we're working specifically on things like infrastructure utilization, identifying developable properties that had maybe gone unknown or unnoticed before, and neighborhood improvements and making sure that we don't have issues where the lack of maintenance of a house has a cancerous effect on the neighborhood, what we might be able to do about that. We're working on things like senior housing, and affordable housing and the development of market-rate housing. We're working on refugee resettlement, as well as, the housing for that. And, a myriad of other things as well, including, obviously, the transition from short- term to longer-term renting of houses and apartments.

Levulis: And to that rental aspect of it, would it in your mind, would it have something to do with regulations, that sort of thing down the line?

Drnek: No, I don't believe so. I mean, I'm not going to say no to anything. In fact, it's obviously you know, not in my purview. It's the type of thing that winds up being determined by council, and the legislative committee to council. But in my mind's eye, I really do see this more being the market will dictate. As it stands right now, the market is typically has been for the last really five decades, been determined by the business model of the student landlords. And in that model, two bedrooms, three bedrooms, four bedrooms, and a house might be rented for $600 a month per each bedroom, so you might be looking at $2,400 a month that a house is returning. And as the numbers of students who can fill these houses diminish, then you're looking at a model that maybe is $1,200. Because you're putting in two students, and you're spending an awful lot of time trying to figure out how to find other students, you're competing with other folks. But from my perspective, and from others’ perspective, we're looking at that $1,200 might be identifiable as market rate to rent the entire house. And maybe that's an easier and more productive way for landlords to start to look at their properties. So I think there'll be a paradigm shift that will be more caused by the, you know, the market itself, then by any kind of intrusion, or regulation by the city.

Levulis: Since we're speaking of housing mayor, I wanted to get your thoughts on Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan to add to add 800,000 housing units across the state in the next decade?

Drnek: Well, you know, I can only speak from the perspective of Oneonta. I know having you know, just recently been at the New York Conference of Mayors and sat with any number of mayors. The state has as many diverse issues as there are municipalities and you know, what works for one is not necessarily going to work for another and I'm going to let people who are smarter than me, which describes a few, figure that all that. From the perspective of Oneonta however we are absolutely supportive of it. In that we would embrace not only the mandates and the dictates of the housing proposal as we see it, but also any assistances that may be in store for us as we hope to be first in line for any assistances that might get us to a place where we're actually a poster child for Governor Hochul’s vision. So if we can, you know, put ourselves very, you know, firmly on her radar screen, I think that helps us.

Jim is WAMC’s Associate News Director and hosts WAMC's flagship news programs: Midday Magazine, Northeast Report and Northeast Report Late Edition. Email: jlevulis@wamc.org
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