Moriah supervisor retires after 38 years

Tom Scozzafava known for taking on bureaucracy, helping his community

By Tim Rowland

When Tom Scozzafava was first elected supervisor in the town of Moriah the price of gas was — a lot less than it is now. But a better gauge of his longevity might rest not with commodities, but with the number of people he has helped and the number of ways in which he has helped them.

“I was thinking the other day how many different generations of people that I served,” Scozzafava said, “from my parents’ generation, the greatest generation, to my generation, to my children’s generation and to their children’s generation.”

Another yardstick might be the number of colleagues he has needled or the number of Albany bureaucrats whose skin he has gotten beneath.

Or the number of times he announced his retirement before he actually brought himself to do it, which he did this month after first taking office 38 years ago when, if you must know, a gallon of gas cost 86 cents. He announced his retirement in 2019, but then Covid hit. He announced his retirement again in 2021, but then the local prison, one of the town’s top employers, was shut down by the state. He’s been replaced by Matt Brassard, who has served on the town board.

In each case, the chance to go to bat for his people — and perhaps the chance to go one more round with “those bureaucrats who sit down there in Albany and haven’t got a clue” — one more time was too great to resist.

Wickedly funny, a voracious reader, notorious penny pincher, and a reveler in his own political incorrectness, Scozzafava served as the Essex County Board of Supervisors Chairman of Finance, as well as its institutional memory and razzar-in-chief.

Scozzafava leaves office as one of the last of the great Adirondack small-government curmudgeons who was not overtly political, but saw downstate legislative initiatives as an affront to North Country common sense and, more importantly, its people. 

Every issue was viewed by Scozzafava through the lens of Moriah’s well-being. Which explains why he can deliver a withering broadside at state agencies in one breath, and be graciously complimentary of them in the next. The Adirondack Park Agency was ridiculously overbearing — yet its economic development people helped develop a successful industrial park in the town. So it’s all relative.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who unlike other six governors he’s served with, never gave him the time of day, is to blame for losing connections between Albany and the Adirondacks. “Even her office doesn’t get back to you. She has no network or continuity with local government — the absolute worst governor that I have ever served with. The worst.” Ten minutes later he’s giving Hochul her due for trying to make the state’s controversial bail-bond reform less onerous to rural jurisdictions.

Yet unlike more caustic Adirondack politicians — and perhaps key to his longevity, onlookers say — Scozzafava never lost the ability to laugh at himself. So no offense was taken when, on his last day in office, his colleagues replaced his leather desk chair with a stainless steel prison toilet. (One wore a white, curly wig, a jab at Scozzafava’s unruly ’doo, which at times suggest an explosion at a bakery.)

“He’s an icon; they don’t make them like Scozzie anymore. Why did so many people like Scozzie? Because Scozzie liked so many people.”

Westport Supervisor Ike Tyler

Scozzafava began his public career as a long-haired, motorcycle-riding teenager who caught on as a Moriah employee under, ironically enough, a federal government work program known as CETA. There, he learned just about everything there was to learn about what it took to run a town, while showing glimmers of the glibness for which he would become famous.

“He had an afro and was the buildings and grounds superintendent for the town of Moriah,” said Lohr McKinstry, who was editor of the old Ticonderoga Sentinel in the early 1980s. “He gave very enthusiastic monthly reports at town meetings; I remember telling Jeff Wright of the (Plattsburgh) Press-Republican, ‘That guy could go somewhere.’”

The local Republican Committee thought so too, and despite the fact that his parents were Democrats, they asked him to run for supervisor in 1985 against a well-liked but ailing incumbent. At the age of 28, Scozzafava began knocking on doors, so green to politics he didn’t realize many of them were in the neighboring town of Crown Point.

When Scozzafava was first elected, the town was still reeling from the closure of its iron mines in 1971, which cost the town 400 jobs, but also half of Moriah’s annual tax revenue. The newly unemployed managed to find other work, but the money wasn’t as easy to replace.

“We were the definition of a one-horse town,” he said. By the time he took office, the gutting of the town treasury had shown up in decaying equipment and infrastructure. Among Scozzafava’s proudest accomplishments is the rebuilding of the town bones while never breaking the state-imposed tax cap.

It was the mines that had lured Scozzafava’s grandfather to these shores, where he became a recruiter for Witherbee, Sherman, meeting immigrating Italians at Ellis Island and ferrying them to tenement housing in Mineville.

There, he demonstrated the classically malleable commercial and ethical values of a traditional Adirondacker, with a hand in multiple enterprises, including a tavern, grocery and liquor store. When the Italian mafia infiltrated Mineville demanding protection money his grandfather had no use for such lawlessness, so he moved to Port Henry where he became a bootlegger.

Such economic creativity and independence has waned during Scozzafava’s years in office. “When I was elected, that generation of homeowners didn’t expect anything. They took care of themselves,” he said. “But in today’s world you have this entitlement attitude that the government needs to be doing all of these things.” 

It was also a time of more partisanship at the local level, where, in the middle of supervisor meetings, Republicans would break away to coordinate their position and vote as a bloc. It was just the sort of groupthink that Scozzafava despised, and despite being a Republican himself he worked to break the practice — a reform that came with a cost.

“It was great for his constituents but since Republicans had a majority on the board it resulted in his never being able to get elected chairman of the board during his entire career as supervisor,” McKinstry said. “They gave him finance chairman instead.”

“Scozzie would stick up for people for all the right reasons,” said Tyler, a friend and contemporary who worked with him at Moriah Shock when Scozzafava took a brief hiatus from public office. No one went to bat or their townsfellows more, which is why it became something of a running joke that half the county employees lived in the town of Moriah.

Tyler said he believes that, for Scozzafava, the joy of helping people was starting to be outweighed by a burgeoning state government that has lost touch with the people of the North Country. “You could see his frustration growing,” Tyler said. “It became all about politics, not the best interests of the people.”

Scozzafava didn’t disagree. While local politics has become less partisan, he said, the opposite is happening at the state and federal level, where only those with access to great amounts of cash have a chance. Other realities are wearing as well, from the abandonment of compromise to the diminished local press. But sometimes all you can do is laugh.

“You’ve got to bring a little fun to the game,” he said. “And I’ve found that that opens a lot more doors. You know, listen, one of the easiest things in the world to do was smile. And believe me, I’ve learned over the years that a smile can open more doors than anything else.”  

Related reading

• Moriah Shock: Not your standard prison
• Death of an Adirondack relic
• What’s next for former Moriah prison?
• Proposed bill would make state pay closed prisons’ property tax
• What’s needed to redevelop Adirondack prisons? Commission weighs in