By Margaret Menge

Rick Gioia is running for village trustee for the second year in a row. So he’s had some practice. And he’s also had a long and intense course in village affairs. Rick has been one of a small group of villagers who’ve attended Village Board meetings more often than not over the last year – meetings that have hashed through issues of parking, the Riverfront, stone bridges, view preservation and police protection. Rick hasn’t just been in the audience at these meetings, he’s been an active participant, speaking from the floor during the public comment period on myriad of issues. He is often the most quotable person in the room.

When he was running last year, Rick referred to the Village of Cornwall-on-Hudson as an “eddy in a stream” – a small piece of land with highways like rivers streaming around it, passing it by. He sees the village like that, as a place that time has passed by in some ways, and that needs to be preserved.

Rick Gioia, age 50, works as a freelance cameraman, mostly on commercials in the city (though he’s worked on several films, also, including the “Bourne” series). He lives on Hudson Street with his wife Barbara Smith Gioia, a painter, and their children, Zach, a junior at Cornwall Central High School and Nina, a sophomore.

Rick was appointed last year to serve on the Village Square Improvement Committee, and Rick has said that he is supporting the candidacy of Barbara Gosda, the chair of that committee. The committee has been a sort of training ground for Gioia and others, who’ve reached out to county and state agencies for grants, and started studying historic maps of the village, in preparing recommendations for improvements to the Village Center.

One of the issues Gioia talked about last year is still hot in the pan – the issue of how the village is policed. He says he thinks villagers don’t see police enough, or that they don’t see a face. “That’s what people in a small village expect a police department to be,” he says. “The casual contact is not there.” He says he’d like to see police on foot patrol in the Village Center, and thinks other residents would like that also.

On whether to consolidate town and village police departments, Gioia says that the village budget needs to be broken out a lot more so that people can really see what they’re paying for. And that whether or not to consolidate depends upon what people are getting for their money. “If people perceive value in something, they’ll pay for it,” he says.

In local elections, issues rarely split cleanly left-right. Rick Gioia might be politically liberal when it comes to national politics (he’s growing out his hair until President Bush is out of office), but on local issues he might be considered a populist, and his passion for preservation is likely attractive to those of every political stripe.

For the last year, Rick has been talking about permits and the riverfront, and advocating for villagers to be able to use Donahue Memorial Park without charge. “The town residents don’t have to pay to use their park; why should village residents have to pay to use theirs?” he said at a recent meeting. The village’s Board of Trustees is now considering a group use policy for the riverfront, where groups would have to pay to use the park, depending on the number of people and number of cars and whether they’re using just the riverfront shelter or the shelter and a swatch of grass. “I’m not crazy about it, but I think if it doesn’t get out of hand…I don’t think it should be the Hudson River location for Anthony’s Pier 9,” he says, referring to the banquet hall directing wedding parties to head down to Cornwall-on-Hudson’s riverfront for picture-taking.

Rick Gioia and Barbara Gosda are running against two incumbents, trustees Peter Miller and Rudy Hahn. Why does Rick think he’d do it better? “I think I’d be looking at issues a little more creatively,” he says. “Joe's started along that road…The dynamic needs to change, so that there are five people up there who are going in the same direction.”

Rick was one of a few residents who showed up at Village Board meetings during the budget process in January and February, and is the one who dug deepest into the budget numbers, asking about specific line items, for the water system in particular. He says he thinks the budget process needs “more transparency” so that people can easily see where tax dollars are going. “…I feel like the tendency’s been to make big splash decisions that unintended consequences,” he says, and mentions the License Agreement signed with The River Bank almost a year ago. “That really smacks of something not being kosher,” he says, saying if he were serving as a trustee at the time, he doesn’t think he would have signed it.

On the village’s View Preservation Law, Gioia says he thinks it’s “shot full of holes” and has been misread and applied to private views when it was only meant to protect the public view shed. “A bad law is worse than no law,” he says, “because it just makes people cynical about the way things are done."

Rick Gioia on the hot topic of parking....

"Is there a parking problem? At certain times I think it is pretty tight. On a Saturday morning let's say, there seems to be a squeeze along Hudson Street....Is there a parking problem? I don't know. I think it's more an issue that our Village Square Improvement Committee is trying to address. Most of it is conditioning people to use the parking that is available and perchance to walk more than 50 feet, to go where they need to go... The signage needs to be obvious and it needs to make sense. And really that is the crux of our committee's work." Rick adds that the village also needs cooperation from the school district to see about public use of the school district administration building on Idlewild, and needs to talk with them about school employees' use of the municipal lot, though he doesn't think this is necessarily a problem, as the lot isn't usually being used by the school during peak dining hours, when it would be needed for restaurants.