<p>Last August, Erica Fiorini picked up the phone.</p> <p>The assistant principal and dean of students at Croton-Harmon High School had an idea that should have been easy: get high school students onto the village's Arts and Humanities Advisory Council. The students were interested. The committee was willing. Fiorini reached out to Trustee Maria Slippen, who serves as the board's liaison to the arts and humanities committee.</p> <p>Then nothing happened.</p> <p>"The arts and humanities committee did not go back and meet with this person," Slippen told the Board of Trustees at their February 11 work session, frustration audible in her voice. "They were waiting for some type of guidance regarding how to do this. That was August. Now it's February."</p> <p>The committee wasn't being difficult. It simply didn't know if it was allowed to add a student member. There were no guidelines — no policy, no procedure, no form. Some Croton committees had informally added students on their own. Others, following the rules-conscious culture the village manager encourages, held back because they didn't want to get it wrong.</p> <p>"Some committees have just, without thinking about the fact that maybe there were rules around it, have a student member," Slippen said. "And some committees are concerned about not following the rules, so they don't have a student member. I don't know how we equalize that."</p> <p>A school asking its village for a pathway to civic engagement — and waiting six months for an answer — is a small thing. But at the February 11 work session, it became the thread that pulled open a much larger argument about who gets to serve on Croton's committees, who decides, and whether the village's governance culture is keeping up with its residents' desire to participate.</p> <h2>The Residency Question</h2> <p>The student-member issue surfaced during a broader discussion about the village's advisory committee governance document — a policy the board has been drafting to formalize how its committees operate, who chairs them, and who can serve.</p> <p>The central question: should committee members be required to live within the Village of Croton-on-Hudson?</p> <p>It sounds simple. It's not.</p> <p>Mayor Brian Pugh argued that expertise should sometimes override geography. His exhibit A: the sustainability committee, his signature initiative, which earned Croton the number-one Clean Energy Community rating in New York State. Some of the members who helped achieve that don't live within village boundaries — they may reside in the Croton-Harmon school district but on the other side of the municipal line.</p> <p>"There are very qualified people on the sustainability committee that do a lot of work for our village who are not residents," Pugh said. "And I'm not gonna say they have to leave."</p> <p>He offered a hypothetical: "Are you saying that an unqualified resident should take the place of — on the sustainability committee, you have, you know, Doctor Oppenheimer..." The analogy trailed off into laughter, but his point was sharp. When you need technical expertise on an advisory body, strict residency requirements could leave you with well-meaning volunteers who lack the background to do the work.</p> <p>Slippen wasn't buying it.</p> <p>"We have more people interested in joining committees than we have spaces for," she said. "We had to turn people away in this last call for committees because there were people interested in joining and there wasn't a space for them."</p> <p>Residents applying to volunteer for their own village, being told no, while non-residents keep their seats. For Slippen, the math didn't add up.</p> <p>"Village committees are for village residents," she said. "I feel kinda strongly about that."</p> <h2>One Person, One Committee</h2> <p>The residency debate dovetailed with a second frustration: some individuals serve on multiple committees simultaneously, while first-time applicants can't get a single appointment.</p> <p>"You've been kicking this can," Slippen told her colleagues. "What does it do? I mean, I just think we have more people interested in joining committees than we have spaces for. And why should we let somebody serve on two when there are people who can't get on one?"</p> <p>Village Manager Bryan Healy confirmed that multiple people were indeed serving on more than one committee. Some had already stepped down voluntarily in anticipation of a formal rule. Others had not.</p> <p>Trustee Nora Nicholson supported the change: "I think it's fair, and I think it's particularly fair if we have an overabundance of people applying for that committee. Arts and humanities is a good example — that committee is full at capacity, and we had more applications than roles."</p> <p>The irony was not lost on anyone: arts and humanities was the same committee where Fiorini's student-member request had been sitting unanswered since August.</p> <h2>What Pugh Was Protecting</h2> <p>Mayor Pugh's resistance to strict residency rules wasn't arbitrary. It was rooted in a specific governance philosophy — and a specific political reality.</p> <p>The philosophy: advisory committees work best when they have people who know what they're doing. Energy policy, land-use planning, historic preservation — these are technical fields. Drawing exclusively from within a village of 8,000 people means a smaller talent pool. Pugh has spent eight years as mayor building committees that produce results, and he views non-resident experts as part of that success.</p> <p>The political reality: Pugh won re-election in November 2025 by 22 votes — the narrowest margin in recent Croton history. The opposition Voice of Croton party has made committee composition a core issue, claiming that 92 percent of committee members are registered Democrats in a village where only 55 percent of voters are. Formalizing residency requirements, while popular with residents who want to participate, also plays into a larger conversation about whether the committees reflect the village or the mayor's network.</p> <p>"There's a lot of weight that goes into being a resident," Pugh said, "but I'm not gonna make it an absolute rule."</p> <p>Nicholson bridged the gap: "I think it's important to codify it because we did somehow go astray at some point."</p> <p>Pugh corrected her gently: "I wouldn't say we went astray."</p> <h2>The Fix — For Now</h2> <p>The board reached a compromise:</p> <p><strong>Chairs of all committees must be village residents.</strong> No exceptions.</p> <p><strong>A majority of each committee's members must be village residents.</strong> This preserves the mayor's ability to appoint non-residents with specific expertise, while ensuring residents hold the controlling seats.</p> <p><strong>One committee per person, effective June 1.</strong> Members currently serving on multiple committees have until the end of the fiscal year to choose which one they'll keep.</p> <p><strong>Student members will be classified as "interns,"</strong> with village manager notification required. This was the short-term fix for the Fiorini situation — imperfect, but enough to tell the arts and humanities committee it can move forward.</p> <p>Full student-member guidelines — addressing age requirements, parental consent, term alignment with the school year, and formal appointment authority — will be developed separately. Village Manager Healy estimated they could be ready by fall 2026. Slippen was not thrilled with that timeline.</p> <p>"The school's asking us to do this," she said. "The committees are asking for a mechanism to do this. I don't want to keep beating the dead horse, but some committees have just gone ahead without guidance and some haven't."</p> <h2>What's Still Unresolved</h2> <p>The February 11 compromise settled the immediate questions, but it left several things open.</p> <p>The specific non-resident subcommittee chair — Nicholson's "real world example" — remains unnamed in the public record, though the context points to a sustainability committee-adjacent body that has been expanding its geographic footprint beyond Croton's borders.</p> <p>The student-member guidelines are promised but not delivered. Fiorini's outreach from August 2025 remains unanswered in any formal sense, though the "intern" classification at least clears the path.</p> <p>And the deeper political tension — between a mayor who values expertise and flexibility, and trustees who see civic participation as something that belongs to the people who live here — isn't going away. Both Slippen and Deputy Mayor Len Simon face re-election this fall.</p> <p>The committee governance document, once finalized, will be the first time Croton has ever codified who gets to serve on its advisory bodies. For a village that has relied on informal norms and mayoral judgment for decades, that's a significant change — no matter how you feel about Doctor Oppenheimer.</p>